True, but have you ever used GTK+ applications in Windows? They look completely out of place. Not only that, but they got an.horrible. redraw rate (resizing windows, putting one over another, etc). I have used GIMP and Gaim for a while and I stopped since they are alien to the rest of the environment. Last time I tried them (about 4 months for GAIM, last week for GIMP), they don’t even use the Win32 standard dialog boxes! In my opinion, the Win32 port was done as an afterthought.
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I guess the original poster meant: is decent Windows support so much to ask? They did, but Apple threatened them, and it was removed from popular theme sites, but I’m sure you can still find it. What a load of codswallop – GNOME and KDE theme sites till host Aqua inspired themes for their respective desktops. Apple got in a tizzy by the fact that people were copying native icons and making them available free of charge for other platforms, and also including the use of trademarks such as the Apple logo and so forth – I see nothing wrong in what Apple did; its no different to, say, Adobe turning around suing people for copying fonts out of their Studio CS and making them available for download free of charge. Oh, and back to the issue; they don’t need to bundle the icons with the source distribution; it would simply be a matter of setting up some macros in the configure script so that when it detects MacOS X, it uses the icons that are native on the machine, thus not requiring any copying. The toolkit doens’t have anything to do with the dropshadows, that’s done by the windowing system. If you look at the screenshots, the GTK windows do have dropshadows: As for “more graphically sophisticated”, I’m not sure what that means, but Cairo gives you features comparable to Quartz.
So isn’t this a step BACKWARD for that platform? You don’t have to use it, but GTK opens the door to making more native-looking ports of Free Software. For whatever reason, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of native Free Software. In my experience wx apps look fairly broken in either environment. Bear in mind that on linux the most widespread wxGTK libs are still tied to gtk1.x (no aliasing, no modern themes, no nothing), because wxGTK2 is still very buggy.
Besides, wx apps for the sake of “same code everywhere” do not use most of the things that make a gtk2 app good: no sizers (fixed size app, just like your average VB6 app), no native fileselector, dropdown and combos custom made and very strange, etc. I use aMule (for example), but it is absolutely ugly. Not to mention that writing an app in python+gtk is a lot easier. would in effect become some kind of binding to MFC (or whatever Windows uses now?) Windows (32bit) always has and still uses win32, MFC is an abstraction on win32 to make programming easier, same for winforms. Wimp draws to windows using win32, there will probably be something like Wimp for MacOSX in the near future. I don’t know why people still bitch about GTK+ apps on windows, with Wimp I find they are sufficiently native.
If that’s not sufficient for you, think about this, is it usual for all window apps to look the same? I can’t believe the ridiculous amount of hatred for a possible GTK port. You know what, It does not stop people programming in Cocoa, or Carbon, and believe it or not you don’t have to use software written with it if you don’t want to. This will bring a few quality apps to OSX from Linux that would never get ported from the platform otherwise. It gives developers another cross platform option which will help bring software to OSX.
I imagine with a decent theme, a bit of care and consideration you and easily write GTK based software to Apples HIG Talking about the HIG, when it’s a choice between not having a program what I want to use that follows the HIG and not having the software I’ll take the former every time. Fainally, for those saying it looks just like windows, please consult your optician and look at to see what a default cocoa button actually looks like, I’ll give you a preview, in is not lozenge shaped!
Well, at least in the cross platform sense. Developers should start separating the front and back end in their apps.
That way they can make the backend very platform independent and portable and then make the frontend with the native toolkit for each platform. Gtk and Qt works well in an x11-enviroment but much less so on other platforms suchs as win32 or macos. Even though an app built with these toolkits may be functional on, say macos x, it almost always feels clunky and like a foreign citizen in the host os. This way, apps will conform to the HIG of the respective OS and generally will feel more enjoyable to work with. You might not get a consistent look across different OS:s but as long as the general layout and menus are the same, I don’t think that matters. I must add that Adobe has succeded pretty well with a cross platform look and feel, though.