Hi, Skimming through the list and saw very little about the widget toolkits that were being done. If you are not interested in the widget toolkits for DirectFB you probably can skip the rest of this email.
I was just talking to someone who was refusing to use an app that used new technology (not DirectFB in this case). The reason was that the app appearance wasn't motif. It wasn't that he was particularly attached to motif, its more that old app X only displayed in motif, and he wanted a common appearance on his desktop. Now, Under X this would is a problem, because each toolkit does its own drawing, and has its own styles. Some (Gtk, Qt) can emulate other styles and some might argue that Motif is the Style for X11. However both XP and OSX do it better. The have a style engine. So a toolkit can say 'draw a button, in your current them', without having to use a heavy object for the button. DirectFB having a style engine (in conjuction with a toolkit?) Would be useful for multiple groups: Single App Devices: A device with a fixed layout and minimal interaction would be able to have nice looking buttons etc. quickly without a heavy (ok, very light, but this way even lighter) toolkit. Toolkit Porting would gain: A default theme that already takes care of DFB features Users would gain: More of their apps would look the same. Of course this doesn't help the original friend, his old app X is always going to look like crap in motif, but at least he can set the DirectFB style engine to motif and have all his apps look the same, even if they look crappy. Now we come to my question part for all those widget toolkit devels out there. I suspect theirs at least 3 original projects (as opposed to ports) started if not active. Anyone on those projects feel that what they have could easily be split so that it was "Style engine" on one side and "Widget Toolkit" on the other. Thats more or less what I was looking for. As near as I can tell a Style engine doesn't need to do much. "Buttons" "Sliders" "ScrollBars" "Panels" "Radio buttons" "Check boxes" Thats enough for a style engine, and without being full widgets makes it even easier to achieve. Its a step towards GUI toolkits in both original and porting. More of course would be useful, but nearly everything in an app can be covered by the above, at least enough to give applications a consistent look and feel. Harder things for the existing toolkits might be animated styles, (progress bars throb, rather than just get longer, etc), but that would be the problem of toolkits being ported. Of course if no-one has done this yet I can do it myself... don't mind. Of course I wouldn't recommend holding your breath for me either. -- Ian.
