Subject: Re: XP dialogs
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Feb 10 2001 - 18:24:20 CST
On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> > too daunting task to create all dialogs *once again* for a new platform
> > (i.e. we're wasting time doing this over and over, and over again). We also
> > have a maintenance nightmare that if any dialog gets changed for one
> > platform we have to (currently) change it three times more for the other
> > ones.
>
> The original approach seems to be sloppy, essensially forcing all
> dialogs to be reimplemented natively on each platform. This is a waste
> of time and defeats much of the purpose of being cross-platform.
>
> I remember that over a year ago someone posted to the list strongly
> suggesting that we should completely switch to wxWindows and even
> considering doing the port. I don't think anything got done on this
> front. I don't know about wxWindows so I'm not going to currently
> reccomend it.
>
> What we need is something like wxWindows, a set of generic widgets
> which are abstracted so they can be implemented natively on each
> platform. This could be an external library, or it could be done in
> XAP. Either way would not be easy. But it really needs to be done.
>
I'm sorry, I strongly disagree. Star Office took this approach. It really
hurts performance adds to bloat and does not help portability. Just
changing from Motif to gtk is estimated to take years and those widget
sets are pretty similar I'm told.
In the interests of not starting a flame war I'm not going to say what I
think we should do if we decide to go this way, yet :-)
Cheers
Martin
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