Re: gEDA-user: Life and death for gEDA: portability...

[John Doty <jpd@space.mit.edu>]

> As for the GUI, I would not write most of the code directly to Gtk 1.2, 
> or Gtk 2.0, or any such thing.  Instead, I'd do what was done in several 
> other popular and portable packages like Mozilla, AbiWord, and 
> OpenOffice: write most of the GUI code to a portable interface layer 
> that hides the OS, and then write a lean custom wrapper for each OS. 
>  This allows the tools to look like a Mac application on a Mac, and a 
> Gnome application in Linux, and just like an application Microsoft would 
> have written on a PC.
> 

The problem with this approach is that you wind up with an application
that *looks* differently from the way it *behaves*. Speaking as a Mac
user, I note that the legendary Mac ease of use depends on totalitarian
application of the Mac design principles through the whole
application. The "skin deep" approach just produces an application whose
behavior doesn't match its appearance, making it harder to use. I'm much
happier with gschem as an undisguised X11 application (there's no problem
with running X11 on a Mac). I'd prefer a *real* native Mac app, of course,
but I'm not complaining about gschem, which is a fine tool despite its use
of the most miserably unsystematic "window system" around. The advantage
of X11 is that it's available for all platforms, so my student's Linux
system runs the same gEDA suite I run on my Mac.

A fake Mac app would be a pain, and a real one as good as gEDA won't
happen anytime soon, I suspect. Denied perfection I must settle for
excellence. Thanks, Ales!

John Doty		"You can't confuse me, that's my job."
Home: jpd@w-d.org
Work: jpd@space.mit.edu