Re: GUI work (was: Graphical help browser)

[David Grundberg]

Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso skrev:
> Although I happen to be be at the stage where I'm just learning Qt,
> and these are the benefits I see:
>
>     1) Completely free and cross platform. I understand compiling Qt
>     on Windows with MinGW is trivial, whereas GTK+ is more of a
>     challenge, but correct me if I'm wrong.
>
>     2) Highly themable and uses native widgets. I think that we don't
>     really *need* a GUI to begin with; we're just trying to put pretty
>     pink bows and unicorns on top of Octave in order to give our users
>     warm fuzzy feelings, and I know native widgets are a big warm
>     fuzzy feeling, especially for Mac users. I personally am also
>     really happy with Qt now that I recently found it can also
>     completely emulate GTK+ looks with a specialised theme[1].
>
>     3) Nice tools to go with it (I rather like Qt Designer better than
>     Glade).
>
>     4) Big players prefer it, so I am guessing they have good reasons
>     for it.
>   

I don't think Qt is a meta-toolkit, i.e. just because it has native 
components/commands/widgets and you use this to create a GUI, the 
program will still be a Qt program, and will not look like a native 
win32 or GTK+ program. This is a common misconception though, I mean, 
GTK+ is also themable, and it's possible to make e.g. buttons to look 
like the user's "native" buttons. But the layout padding will be totally 
off, the menus will have the items in wrong order and the shortcuts will 
be wrong for any platform but the one it was designed for. This is true 
for Qt too, or any other multiplatform toolkit.

Neither wxWidgets, GTK+ or Qt makes it possible to design once and get a 
native look-and-feel across all platforms. (Trust me, I recently tried 
all these toolkits out.) Most of them don't even have basic things like 
a layout manager that automatically selects the right padding for the 
current platform. If one wants a truly native gui, one must take the 
platform differences into consideration and carefully design the gui for 
each platform. I think it's better to actually run the native toolkit 
for each platform you want your program to run on. (Sorry wxWidgets) 
There are no shortcuts to true native experience.

Basically what I'm saying is, if you want your program to run on MacOS 
X, design everything in detail to be exactly like a MacOS X application. 
The easiest way to do this is to run Apple's toolkit. The same thing 
goes for every other desktop environment (GTK+ is easiest for GNOME, Qt 
for KDE, WinForms/win32 for Windows, etc..)

Just my .02 crowns...

David