Subject: Re: XP dialogs
From: Thomas Fletcher (thomasf@qnx.com)
Date: Sun Feb 11 2001 - 10:00:00 CST
On Sat, 10 Feb 2001, Aaron Lehmann wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 11, 2001 at 01:38:04AM -0500, Tom Briggs wrote:
> > Having an abstract dialog layout system will help us developers but hurt the
> > users. Don't forget which is more important.
> >
> > -Tom
>
> The $25 question is whether we will be able to help users more
> effectively if we're not forced to waste time reimplementing dialogs
> on dozens of platforms.
I'd like to chime in here as one of the few people who has actually
ported AbiWord to another platform (and I've done it twice now).
Bringing the main AbiWord interface up was easy and took no time
at all.
Completing the rest of the work (ie the dialogs) was hell.
Not because they are necessarily hard to do, in fact, given a
screenshot of an existing dialog it doesn't take long to whip
one up on any given platform assuming that you are familiar with
that platform (this is why we have "platform" maintainers).
The problem with the AbiWord dialogs is that each back end is
managed and implemented differently. Some dialogs have a
very complete XP implementation so that the GUI really just
feeds the XP class and vice versa. Others rely on a lot more
work to be done in the actual platform GUI code. This makes
impementing the dialogs a real pain.
I'd be happy if we had a utopian world where you could code the
dialog in XP land completely. I don't think that it is going
to happen any time soon, so I'd suggest instead that coming
up with a consistant set of rules on how to manage the dialogs
would be more worthwhile.
Thomas
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