language_fan wrote:
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:54:25 +0200, Jacob Carlborg thusly wrote:
On 10/12/09 14:11, language_fan wrote:
Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:02:11 +0200, Jacob Carlborg thusly wrote:
On 10/12/09 04:14, Chad J wrote:
Too bad we can't just make programs switch between GUI backends at
will ;)
Why not have a GUI toolkit available on almost all platforms that uses
native controls just like DWT?
The list of native platforms SWT supports is this:
Win32
WPF (under development)
AIX, FreeBSD, Linux, HP-UX, Solaris:
Motif
GTK+
Mac OS X:
Carbon
Cocoa
QNX Photon
Pocket PC
As a FLTK2, Qt 3.x, Qt 4.x, Swing, and (forked) Harmonia user I fail to
see how SWT is more native than the ones I develop for. All SWT
applications look weird, unthemed, and have horrible usability issues
in the file open/save dialogs. DWT brings another level of cruft above
the "lightweight" SWT and performs badly.
As a said previously SWT is more native because it uses the native GUI
library available on the current platform, for windows (before vista)
win32, osx cocoa and on linux gtk. It doesn't decide how a button should
look, it doesn't try do draw a button that is similar to the natives, it
just call the native library to draw the button.
The problem is, 99% of win32 users use the win32 gui toolkit on win32,
99% of osx users use cocoa, but on Linux/BSD maybe about 40% use gtk+. It
is not The native toolkit to use. I do not even have it installed on my
system.
I don't know what you mean by "unthemed" but if you refer to that
applications on windows don't get the winxp look you have the same
problem if you create the application in c++ or c and uses win32. It's
caused by an older dll is loaded as default and to get the winxp look
you have to request it to load the newer dll with a manifest file.
Welcome to dlls.
I mostly work on *nixen. The unthemed means that I do not have *any* gtk+
libraries installed anywhere so it defaults to the ugly default theme. To
me gtk+ does not have the native feel as I never see any application
written in it. Like I said, I only use { FLTK2, Qt 3.x, Qt 4.x, Swing,
and (forked) Harmonia}. I am sorry if you have trouble reading that.
Whenever an application comes with its own (statically linked) gtk+ libs,
it will look bad. I do not have any "control panel" to change the look
and feel of the gtk+ applications.
If you have problems with the open/save dialogs in SWT either you will
have the same problem in other native applications because it uses the
native dialogs or there's a bug in SWT.
Look, this is what I get on Win32:
http://johnbokma.com/textpad/select-a-file-dialog.png
on Linux:
http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/wp-content/uploads/20050710-
kdefilechooser.png
on Java:
http://www.dil.univ-mrs.fr/~garreta/docJava/tutorial/figures/uiswing/
components/FileChooserOpenMetal.png
You can probably see something that I have started to call 'consistency'.
Almost the same buttons and layouts on every platform. I immediately know
how it works. The same design has been there since Windows 95, if I
recall correctly. This is what many people have learned to live with.
Now every time I see a gtk+/swt/dwt application I wonder where the heck
that unintuitive terrible piece of cr*p came:
http://book.javanb.com/swt-the-standard-widget-toolkit/images/0321256638/
graphics/14fig03.gif
Native? It might very well use native binaries on my platform, but the
native feel ends there.
I get an entirely different file dialog on win7, and my gnome dialog on
ubuntu looks nothing like the screenshot you linked.
This is the win7 dialog:
http://i.msdn.microsoft.com/Dd758094.Libraries_CommonFileDialog%28en-us,VS.85%29.png
This is close to what I have on ubuntu:
http://blogs.gnome.org/mortenw/wp-content/blogs.dir/26/files/2009/02/file-dialog2.png
I have no Qt or KDE on both my linux installs (ubuntu 9 and a cross
linux from scratch), the GUI looks smooth and works great, using the
latest gnome 2.6 libraries.
Why don't you install GTK+? You can't whine about applications built for
gnome looking ugly if you don't have gtk installed, it can live pretty
well alongside Qt, I used to do that until i switched to gnome after 2.6
was released.
