Bernard Devlin wrote:
> The interesting question is what has happened to the programming
> of the Rev GUI since RunRev took over development from Metacard.
> I was not a MC user, but since MC was primarily aimed at Unix
> GUIs, I cannot believe that the same kinds of problems were
> experienced by unix users.
I think what happened was Motif died. :)
MC was originally built around emulated appearances, and only migrated
to native appearances in the late '90s with Mac OS. Later versions of
the Windows and more recently the Linux engines now also use native
appearances, but the overhead of integrating the engine's internals with
these generalized systems is far greater than being able to handle
everything itself.
When there was only Motif, life was easy. But that was a long time ago,
and today shipping anything using the Motif lookAndFeel looks really dated.
While undesirable for commercial deployment, I suspect that using any of
the emulated appearances (Motif is alien looking to most modern users,
and the "Win95" lookAndFeel is a very distant approximation of the KDE
experience) would yield much better performance.
For the long term it seems clear that the Rev engine's interface with
Linux window managers needs an overhaul to address not only performance
issues but a good many aesthetic ones as well (note the weird appearance
of some fields and buttons under Gnome).
I recognize that the work needed may represent a relatively low
return-on-investment given the number of Linux-only customers in Rev's
installed base weighed against what I imagine is a fairly substantial
chunk of work to move it to a more graceful state.
But Linux is the fastest-growing desktop operating system on the planet,
and its role in the deployment plans of all of RunRev's customers will
only continue to grow. IMNSHO, it's an investment worth making.
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World
Revolution training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
Webzine for Rev developers: http://www.revjournal.com
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