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

From: Mathew Robertson (mathew.robertson_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-08-25 02:33:02

> > 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.

[ The discussion certainly belongs here - this discussion is about cross-platform GUI toolkits, which is a subset of cross-platform toolkits in general, which is very much a Boost topic. ]

> 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.

Unless I missed completely missed something about OSX, you would preferably code it in Objective-C (which is a fantastic language for creating GUI's).  In which case, GUI's for most other platforms are coded in C, C++, Delphi, VB, etc. wouldn't have a place on OSX.

Is the prefered language to program GUI's on OSX, C++?

> > 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.)

you highlighted my point exactly - they are bad, compared to native applications, because it is _really hard_ to make a cross-platform GUI library.  They are good, particularily considering this fact.

> 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.

tractable => "Easily managed or controlled; governable"  (dictionary.com)

is the problem "difficult" or "easy"?  (my guess that you have miss-type the last bit of the sentence - although I'm not sure which way it was meant...)

Mathew