On Sun, Aug 7, 2011 at 2:32 PM, Graeme Geldenhuys <[email protected]> wrote: > Please tell me that was a joke.
Unfortunately it isn't. Let's compare what was achieved in the last 10 years by these two companies: * Borland/Embarcadero -> In the last 10 years they started multiple failled products (Kylix, Delphi.NET), added 1 major feature to the VCL (Unicode), bought a couple of other projects (Delphi for PHP) and managed to reduce themselves from a major player to a minor one which isn't even in the news usually. * Qt -> Started in a garage with 2 guys while Borland was in NASDAQ and grew to become much more important then Delphi today. In the city where I live there are many Qt programmer jobs, but zero Delphi programmer jobs. How can this not be incompetence? > To be VCL "compatible" they have to resort > to only using the common features across platforms That's valid for *any* cross-platform toolkit. > Qt being proof that a cross platform toolkit is possible, > but you need to be flexible in your design. With some innovation and > unique design it is much more plausible. If Qt did it, why can't they do it to? It's just a question of adding more APIs for the missing functionality which people were completing with the Windows API. Qt did the same when they gradually added APIs for their toolkit. There is nothing special in the VCL that stops it from being a cross-platform GUI toolkit. It could even be implemented fully custom drawn if they think it is too much trouble to learn Cocoa... Even for mobiles, Qt doesn't use a different toolkit for mobiles, so why should we? > Let history be a lesson too. What "clone" of a popular product is > currently a success today. NONE! All basic GNU tools (bash, rm, ls, etc) are clones of proprietary UNIX equivalents. Linux <- started as a minix clone KDE copies the Windows desktop style and it even has a KolourPaint OpenOffice is pretty much a clone of MS Office 97. Now, here we see something very similar to the VCL/LCL thing. OpenOffice pretty much clones MS Office, but that does not mean a blind follower like mono was. When MS Office introduced their new reboon, OpenOffice didn't follow them. Similarly the LCL doesn't have to blindly follow what Embarcadero does in the future. But just like OpenOffice we are *not* into changing because of fashion. Backwards compatibility is important. Adding new stuff is much more relevant then changing old stuff which works perfectly well for fashing reasons. > Many dialog didn't look like Mac dialogs and > components. eg: LCL buttons are rectangular, or rectangular with > rounded edges and sometimes round (like actual Mac button). Who do you think that paints LCL-Carbon buttons? They are native, aqua buttons, they are just square because of the size... Aqua paints all buttons with height >= 23 square. Just try in the Lazarus in the form designer and you will see. You don't see many square buttons in other apps simply because they use smaller buttons.... So I don't see anything wrong with the LCL here. Unless you think that Carbon and Cocoa are wrong too, but that would be a non-sense. >> http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Custom_Drawn_Controls > > Funny you mention that. Isn't that exactly the opposite of what the > Lazarus project is trying to achieve? Or are you now agreeing that the > native LCL controls are just not good enough, or flexible enough, so > you have to resort to custom drawn controls? As I said, Lazarus gives you choice. You can choose for your project what you want and you can mix native and non-native controls in the same project. That's very powerful and unique, I don't know any toolkit which offers that. > So what is the Lazarus project going to do now? Wait to see what > Embarcadero releases, then start the whole catch-up game again - > always being two steps behind. Does Embarcadero actually release anything new to the VCL? The only thing in the last 10 years was unicode support... And we are *not* playing catch-up, we introduced Unicode support before the VCL... > The IDE has unique features that > make it a better product. So developers want to use it. LCL is a > clone, always behind what Delphi does, cannot innovate or be original. The LCL has unique features, it looks like you just don't know them. Some examples: WindowState: wsFullscreen TDBNavigator Option to have focusable buttons (useful for mobiles, accessibility) TForm/TWinControl.setShape (one version receives a bitmap another receives a TRegion) TLazIntfImage TIcon in the LCL is extremely powerful and *much* larger (in amount of functionality) then the VCL equivalent TTrayIcon <- We introduced it before the VCL did -- Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
