Hi,

> I've been delighted to see the progress that's been made in porting
> NetSurf to new platforms.

Me too :)

> Really, I want to know if they are at a usable state or if they can
> just
> fetch and render a page but not much else or whatever. Sadly I don't
> have
> the OSes to test them myself.

Well for now the BeOS version renders and you can enter urls or click
them in the page, and opens a new window on middle button.
However there had been some regressions, like I've yet to use libns* so
some pics don't show anymore, text field don't seem to be editable
anymore.

There are some screenshots there:
http://revolf.free.fr/beos/shots/ but not standardized.

> For choice of web sites to screenshot, either select a mainstream web
> site
> that NetSurf is capable of rendering quite well or a site which is
> key for
> the specific platform. So for example, http://www.haiku-os.org/ might
> be a
> good idea for the BeOS port screenshot. :)

Except it triggers an assert I've yet to fix :D

> Also, for general interface, I'm not sure if you have access to the
> GTK or
> RISC OS ports, but it would be nice to have some constancy across all
> platforms.

I've tried to follow existing ports, I used the GTK code as template in
some places.

> The main browser window aims to be as lightweight as possible, taking
> as
> little space up with toolbars and status bars as possible. This is to
> allow the maximum amount of screen to be used for the important bit,
> the
> web pages.

It's quite similar to the good old BeOS native browser, NetPositive btw
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetPositive

> At the top there is a toolbar with some buttons on the left, then a
> URL
> bar and a throbber on the right. We want the interface to be as
> simple as
> possible so there aren't many toolbar icons by default. Only the RISC
> OS
> version currently has a configurable toolbar.

Currently the toolbar buttons are just plain buttons with a text label
as I was too lazy to use BPictureButton but that'll be fixed.

> The status bar at the bottom is on the same line as the horizontal
> scrollbar. The horizontal scrollbar is not used often for web pages
> because we aim to flow the page to the window width, unless the page
> is
> fixed-width. By default, the status bar takes up two thirds of the
> space
> and the scrollbar takes up one third. Between the status bar and the
> scrollbar there is a widget that can be dragged to show more status
> bar
> and less scrollbar or vice-versa.

As for the status bar, BeOS already had this tradition of splitting the
scrollbar and status bar. Not everywhere though, but Tracker used it:
http://www.birdhouse.org/macos/beos_osx/multi.gif

I might add a slider to change the proportion later.

François.


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