On Thu, 26 Aug 2010, Devin Samarin wrote: > I moved the URL from > > http://eboyjr.homelinux.org:8080/gtk/ > to > http://eboyjr.homelinux.org:8081/
This looks good to me. But given that the website is getting a lot of attention, I'd like to suggest one area where the content needs to be changed: the material relating to GTK on OS X. The new draft site basically does what the old one does, namely hands off to http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/ for everything to do with OS X. But that site has some serious problems. It has an old-fashioned, clunky look. Worse, the author(s) spell the name of the target operating system incorrectly: Apple's OS X is consistently referred to as "OSX". Much worse still, it gives an overall impression of pessimism and disarray. To quote: "The native Quartz display is handled by libgdk-quartz and libgtk-quartz... Unfortunately, these libraries are not yet feature-complete. What's more, while most other Gnome functionality can be made to work on OSX, few if any of the developers have any interest [sic] cross-platform compatibility. Developers considering GTK+ as a cross-platform environment for new work are advised to evaluate other toolkits carefully before committing to GTK if they consider OSX an important market." A nice advertisement -- not! It may be that the Quartz port of GTK is stalled. (It looks that way, though I'm not an expert on the topic.) But if that's so, I can think of a good reason why it might be: Apple ships a decent X11 implementation with current OS X, and installs it by default, so that GTK apps work well on the Mac without GtkQuartz. Sure, it would be nice to have totally native GTK apps on the Mac, but that's a luxury and I can imagine why working on it might not motivate many people all that strongly. IMO, the site for GTK on OS X should "accentuate the positive" (i.e. GTK-X11 works well) while also talking about the Quartz port objectively and (if this makes sense) encouraging developers who are fans of both GTK and OS X to contribute. One more thing: the site should offer a downloadable binary runtime package for X11-based GTK on the Mac. Many GTK app developers, I suspect, develop on Linux but wish to offer Windows and Mac versions. We don't necessarily have time, opportunity or interest to build the whole GTK stack for the target OS. (Cross-compilation is of course not trivial.) We can download a Windows GTK runtime to distribute, and that's great. It would be a big step forward if we could also download a Mac runtime. I don't know how many people share these views, but if I'm not totally out on a limb I would be willing to draft a page along the lines I'm talking about (recruiting help from those who are more knowledgeable). I'd also be willing to try making a runtime package if I can get some time on OS X -- though I suspect others are better qualified than I for that job. The R guys have some packages at http://r.research.att.com/libs/ and maybe one of them would be willing to do an "official" build. Allin Cottrell _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list