On Tue, 17 Apr 2007 01:50:14 +0200 "Graeme Geldenhuys" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 4/17/07, Lord Satan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > Forcing all GTK applications to always use the theming colors is *not* > > > always the developers desire. > > > > In this case the developer has the option to use an application specific > > appname.gtkrc file to override the standard theme and use his own. > > > > I didn't know about that. http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Lazarus_Faq#How_can_my_gtk_programs_use_custom_rc_files.3F > But then, why must someone that writes > cross platform applications in Lazarus, have to know about the fine > details about the workings of different GUI toolkits. The whole point > of the Lazarus LCL is to hide that from the developer. All the > developers should need to know is that they can switch the backend GUI > toolkit by only changing a single combobox in the compiler settings. > That should be the beauty of the LCL. For application developers point > of view, there shouldn't be little workarounds depending on the > widgetset used. If all widgetsets would work the same that would be true. But things are as always more complicated. Linux, Mac OS and Windows all use different design philosophies for their GUIs. The users of the corresponding OS want their apps to look and feel 'native'. But to achieve a native look&feel you have to adhere to the design standards of the given platform. You just cannot easily abstract everything without loosing those differences. As lazarus is developed by a rather small team it is mostly not worth the effort to make such little details work as that can be complex tasks with little benefit. People coming from Delphi sometimes seem to forget that for Delphi most things are much more easy as it is only single platform and Borland/Inprise/whatever-they-are-called-nowadays had enough trouble getting Kylix to work (and failed) and that is just one other platform. If you need more 'exotic' features of the GUI it is the task of the developer to make sure that they work (more or less) consistent on every platform. And then the developer has to know a little bit more about the widgetsets than a developer that only needs 'standard' functionality. If there were open standards for gui toolkits there would be no problem but there aren't any and so sometimes a multi-platform developer has to know a bit or two about the platforms he develops for and has to include platform specific code. Don't get me wrong. I really would like to just write code once and it works on every platform the same and for many things lazarus achieves this but unfortunately not for all. And this is not just a problem with widgetsets. I code mostly OpenGL which was developed as a cross platform library and even I don't get around using platform specific code for some tasks. So in conclusion some things that are high on your priority list are low on the priority list of the lazarus developers and I hope I could explain why although I am not a lazarus developer. Btw I don't give a **** for VCL/Delphi compatability but unfortunately the developers have a different opinion. So we both have to live with what we get. You can at least hope and help that your feature requests get included in lazarus. But I don't thinks that lazarus will drop Delphi compatability anytime soon, well, perhaps when hell freezes over. Greetings Lucifer _________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe" as the Subject archives at http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailarchives
