[boost] Re: Java style GUI in C++

From: Miro Jurisic (macdev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-08-25 00:43:40

In article <079f01c48a2e$3e02b4f0$a901000a_at_mat>,
 "Mathew Robertson" <mathew.robertson_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> > I agree. You point out two major failing of most C++ frameworks: lack of 
> > modern C++ use and lack of exception safety. I see the rest of this thread 
> > talking a lot about C++ techniques, but there seems to be one major 
> > component that everyone is overlooking: producing a good user experience.
> > 
> > Perhaps as a Mac developer I am more aware to the importance of a good user 
> > experience; one of the major failings of every cross-platform C++ framework 
> > on Mac OS is a poor user experience -- usually due to reinventing 
> > OS-provided UI wheels, and thus often making the UI subtly inconsistent 
> > with the rest of the OS. This kind of subtle (or less subtle) inconsistency 
> > is what makes users (entirely justifiably) bitch and moan and shoddy ports, 
> > and give bad product reviews.
> 
> umm... which part of "cross-platform" and "use native functionality" is more 
> important?

You are falsely presenting them as mutually exclusive choices.

> If you have some functionality provided by one OS, while another doesn't 
> provide it... what do you do?

That case is actually almost completely irrelevant to my point. My point has to 
do with "reinventing OS-provided wheels", which is completely different from 
providing additional functionality on a particular OS.

> MacOS is a hard creature to make apps portable to - as its UI is 
> significantly different to most other OS's, that making a cross-platform 
> library which appears to work as a native OSX app is hard, real hard.

I don't know where you got the idea that the Mac OS X UI is significantly 
different from most other OSes. It is more alike than it is different, and I 
think you are misinformed (or, more likely, that your information is out of 
date). If you can provide some specific examples, I will be happy to try to 
correct you; However, I don't think that discussion belongs here.

That said, I think that your argument here is really that if you start by 
designing a framework without understanding how Mac OS X differs from other 
OSes, your framework will have trouble porting to Mac OS X. This is hardly a 
surprise. You can argue that way for any platform -- it's hard to port to a 
platform you don't understand.

> Take Mozilla/Firefox/OpenOffice - each of these suffers the "not quite OS 
> integrated, compared with native apps", even though these apps are propably 
> some of the highest profile cross-platform applications.

The quality of the user interface of all of those applications is something that 
I, as a professional Mac developer, would be ashamed to ship. (They are not all 
equally bad, though.)

I firmly believe that the problem of producing a cross-platform framework that 
is able to accommodate the user experience demands of several platforms is 
difficult and tractable.

I also believe this community is capable of producing such a framework, but I 
think that it's telling that the title of this thread is "Java style GUI in 
C++"; a Java style GUI typically implies making user experience sacrifices on 
every platform, and therefore I believe that a "Java style GUI in C++" is likely 
to be driven by misguided goals.

meeroh