This is an interesting question: "For routine use, the EditField as it
is works fine, doesn't it?"
Yes and no. It does work, but on Mac OS X it sure does lack some of the
available options that other Carbon apps have. The EditField is
primitive and doesn't support some of the niceties that other apps offer
such as inline spellchecking (which is huge).
I am not of the attitude that cross-platform is synonymous with "behaves
identically". My goal with cross-platform is to provide similar
functionality using the best methods on each platform. If you're
designing a word processing application, it might make more sense that
it behaves identically on each platform, but I don't think the majority
of the apps have this constraint. I think that most applications would
benefit from having the best available controls on each platform, even
if that means that they differ slightly where it makes sense. Customers
should be able to expect that a given control in a program will behave
the same way it does in all the other apps on that system. Right now,
the RB EditFields behave VERY differently than most of the Mac OS X
editfields that are in Cocoa or Carbon. It looks and feels sloppy,
inconsistent and unprofessional.
If you look at web browsers, the most important aspect is simply that it
draws the elements in the same location. How the text boxes work is
irrelevant. As long as the form accepts the data, packages it up and
sends it off to the script correctly, that is all that matters. The
same is true in many of the uses of core UI controls. Exactly "how"
they behave should be defined by the system on which they run. Making
sure that there is compatibility between overall operations is the
responsibility of the development environment or framework.
I guess it all depends on what is being developed. My opinion is that
REALbasic should offer the best-of-class, native, control for each given
control. The cross-platform features should be reduced to the
appropriate mirrored subset, and system-specific enhancements should be
exposed where appropriate with specific variables/properties.
- Ryan Dary
Marc Zeedar wrote:
On Tue, November 14, 2006 7:39 am, Norman Palardy wrote:
Do they want the
controls to work the same on all platforms, or do they want the
most "native" controls on their platform?
In reality probably both.
And it [the EditIField] does have issues when you try to provide a
consistent cross platform experience.
But isn't that mostly because people are pushing the EditField beyond its
design? I believe the EditField's original purpose is for simple bits of
text, text fields in dialogs, etc., not full-fledged WYSIWYG word
processing. For routine use, the EditField as it is works fine, doesn't
it?
I'd love to see REAL Software offer an additional WP control -- perhaps
the Formatted Text Project -- for high-end, cross-platform sophisticated
text processing apps. Even if that control was only in the pro version,
that'd be okay. I just want it. (Yes, my main RB app is a word processor.)
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