On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 5:01 AM, Robert J. Slover <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Jan 19, 2009, at 20:08, Gregory John Casamento <[email protected]> > wrote: > > Robert, > > I agree that this is a conundrum. :) We are facing the same decision that > had to be made for OpenStep on Windows. > > I really believe that we should choose an approach similar to the one that > NeXT took at that point. I would be very skeptical of an MDI based > approach, but I might be open to providing it as an option, if someone can > show me that it's a viable approach for GNUstep apps. > > What concerns me about MDI are the modifications that would be necessary in > the backend to support it... as well as possible impacts on the API to > accommodate the concepts having subwindows (which MDI uses) would > introduce. > > > I didn't say I liked the idea of MDI, just that it would be what I would > expect to see in a Windows app in this situation. :-) > I believe there's a very good reason for that... Windows originally needed > to "embrace and extend" a bucketload of applications ported over from other > environments where the menu-per-window nonsense didn't exist and didn't make > sense. These would be applications from DOS, Macintosh (including what would > become Office and Works), etc. More importantly, the users needed to follow > and Windows needed to provide for their habits --many DOS applications had > built-in "window" management via menu accelerators, or the Borland-style > top-of-screen horizontal menu across all of the windows when you hit F10, > etc. Not to mention Mac apps had a single, shared application menu and (at > the time) application-centric window focus policy. If you were Aldus getting > ready to port PageMaker and FreeHand from the Mac, MDI would easily have > deferred a complete GUI re-think, as well as a total rewrite of > documentation and training materials. So, MDI let foreign menu and window > policies be safely shoe-horned into Windows. It is the same problem, and > therefore what I would expect to see on Windows in this case.
This might have been true, but MDI is a forgotten thing (at least I hope!) in Windows. I would hate for GNUstep apps to suddenly be MDI (!). Frankly, either the application has a main window and we can shoehorn a menu, or not. I expect that if you want your application to run on Windows you can take a couple of hours reviewing your UI... and most applications will already have a main window... Also, as david pointed, this work on NSWindows95InterfaceStyle should be helpful as well for GNUstep apps running under KDE and GNOME. -- Nicolas Roard _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
