On Fri, 2007-03-16 at 08:35 -0400, Sam Carleton wrote: > It makes me wonder > about unified GUI development. The last thing I want to do is have a > Gtk# for Linux, once I get there, WinForms for Windows, and CocoaSharp > for OSX.
*You* may not like having platform-specific UI code, but your *users* will love it. There are only two portable UI libraries that work on Win32, Linux, and OS X: Qt and Java Swing. (GTK+ is in the works.) Both permit what you want, and both annoy the users. In particular, since Qt and Swing (and GTK+) all rely on custom drawing, AS SOON AS the OS vendor updates the look-and-feel of their native widgets, the the apps look "wrong" or "old." (Assuming that they were ever "right" to begin with -- I've heard complaints against Qt that the buttons under OS X don't have the same amount of padding around words that "real" widgets have.) Then there's drag-and-drop, integration with the OS X "Services" menu, etc. Portable UI code is good for *you*. It's NOT good for the user, unless all of your users are on one platform (in which case you don't need to care about a portable UI library, do you?). > So in the end, my thoughts have been leaning towards punting with .Net > and either using Mozilla's XULRunner and XPCom as the framework, or > using Qt. I do like C++ development, but I do fully respect the speed > and ease of .Net development, so the question remains: The good news is that XULRunner and XPCom can work with Mono. The bad news is that it's really [EMAIL PROTECTED] ugly and brittle (last I heard); see the ASP.NET Editor within MonoDevelop. > Is there a way I can develop a unified GUI using Mono that will give > me a rich user interface in both Windows and OSX? Rich? Yes. Rich enough for all of your users expectations? Never in a million years. People have tried for decades, and no one has succeeded. - Jon _______________________________________________ Mono-list maillist - [email protected] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/mono-list
