On 9/13/2010 2:49 PM, Casper Bang wrote:
That is not my experiences, you generally can NOT just expect a Swing app to look and feel correct all over. I have written a fair amount of Swing and it's more complex and slower performing than native bindings. You'll find the menu bar wrong placed on Mac, widget background discolored on Linux, EDT paint issues etc. So this is actually about the only point I agree with Steve Jobs on; native widget toolkit is the only way to go if you want to make your users happy.
Hmm....
Well there's always things like iTunes on Windows that show you can do worse at cross-platform GUIs than Swing. [Really there are just so many things that should work that don't, especially thing like keyboard equivalents for tree actions.] Other bits like Pidgin, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc, on Windows don't really strike as being substantially "more native" than most Swing apps I use or any better or worse in such regards.
On the flip side, I guess as a *user* (not a developer) I could care less about >90% of "nativeness" of an application. I just want some basic, long-standing key equivalents to work. Beyond that, whatever goes as long as the resulting UI is clear, isn't just "out there" weird, or self-inconsistent/buggy. The latest "widget" fads are just that -- fads. Many /native /apps do their own widgets in an attempt at coolness.
I guess this comes in part from spending most of my time using Windows but not really liking anything about Windows -- it's just what's easiest to work with at work. As a long-term Mac and UNIX user /prior to /Mac OS X, Mac OS X's widgets (while pretty) largely confuse and annoy me. Other UNIX-based GUIs today are a veritable cacophony of inconsistency. Given that the /vast/ majority of users are Windows users that have just been sucked into the platform by circumstance, I really don't see "native widgets" as compelling for many apps. Something clear and reasonable is more than sufficient for me. Anything more is pretty -- but pretty meaningless -- eye candy.
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