Kalle wrote:
2007/1/25, Sean Luke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
- It's true that different (Newton vs. GTK+) doesn't mean
better.
But IMHO it doesn't require rabid fanboyism to make a cogent argument
that GTK+ is distinctly inferior to OS X
Yes, obviously a widget toolkit has no chance against an operating
system from an interface point of view... ;)
:-) I meant Cocoa, of course. I can't defend Carbon.
and maemo is inferior to
NewtonOS from an interface point of view. That being said, it *was*
fair mentioning where the Newton's _not_ all that hot, so I added
some items there. But I think it's fairly objective: GTK+ may or may
not be better than KDE's offerings perhaps, but as a GUI development
environment it's a long way shy of environments like Cocoa and
NewtonOS [and yes, I think Cocoa > NewtonOS].
I think GTK+ developers and community would like to fix this, so could
you perhaps elaborate on this "long way" Cocoa is more advanced than
GTK+? What I've seen on my wife's Mac has really left me wondering
what the heck is all the fuzz about the Mac UI. Sure, it has some
millions of dollars spent on polish (as you point out below), but
apart from few real solutions (which, btw, do not have anything to do
with Cocoa) it really seems to be just a extra layer of varnish. The
regular widgets seen in every window have basically the same
functionality in both GTK+ and Mac UI, and I haven't yet seen anything
that could not be implemented with GTK+ widgets if one wishes to do
so.
I promised not to go into further detail extensively: but what *I*
think makes Cocoa impressive is not its prettiness. That's almost
immaterial. It's the development environment's richness,
consistency, and pervasiveness throughout the entire operating
system. NeXT figured this out: if you give developers a collection
of very rich and powerful tools, they have little need to build their
own and thus make user experiences different from one another. Apple
inherited that from NeXT. Among the highlights are one of the finest
2D graphics libraries anywhere (CoreGraphics), with easy support for
very sophisticated PDF printing; elegant internationalization; easy
multi-architecture binary support; and the finest typographic engine
ever created (ATSUI). And a very _very_ nice widget set. One of my
favorite Mac application houses is OmniGroup, whose wunderkind just
left and founded Delicious Monster. Apps like Delicious Library,
OmniWeb, and OmniGraffle are pretty strong examples of how you can
take Cocoa and run with it. Low points include, I think: no GC, and
QuickTime's API, which is pretty awful.
As a developer, you'd do well to look into developing for OS X rather
than examining its interface as a user. Even if you can't stand ObjC
-- and some can't -- I think you'll still be impressed. Apple lucked
out when they bought NeXT.
(on a tongue-in-cheeck side note, GTK+ has traditionally been regarded
as the fat cow of linux desktop toolkits while QT is seen as the
flashy sleek one, so maybe you should take a look at Qutopia too and
see if that's more to your liking?-))
No, I'm comfy with fat cows. My primary application development
environment is Swing. :-(
Anyway, there's something to
be said for massive amounts of resources and UI expertise.
Like Microsoft Windows has.
Touche! But Microsoft is the counterexample to an amazing number of
things!
May I say that I expected rather more antagonism than I've gotten
even with my obnoxious follow-up. The professionalism of this list
is impressive.
Sean
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