On 10/3/12 6:07 PM, James Wettenhall wrote: > I'd just like the majority of the GUI's options to be available via a > command-line interface, and I'd like to have a bit of advanced warning > before the X11 viewer disappears.
The Java viewer provides 100% of the GUI options on the command line, and it can read them from parameters as well, if it is used as an applet. It's actually a pretty clever design (and I don't take credit for that.) > GTK development in Windows? Last time I tried that, I found it very > painful, but things may have improved since then. wxWidgets (which I > use) uses GTK on Linux, but not on Windows. Have you ever tried writing a Windows GUI application using bare metal Win32 calls? GTK is a breeze by comparison, and I'm actually comfortable developing with it (I used it on a commercial environmental monitoring application that I developed a few years back.) I am comfortable with FLTK as well, but I've seen the trouble that the TigerVNC developers have gone through to make it do what a VNC viewer needs to do. To build TigerVNC these days, you have to install a specific snapshot of FLTK and apply about two dozen patches in a specific order and then hope it builds (I have yet to successfully build their version of FLTK on Mac.) The resulting GUI is not very visually appealing, either. I am watching the progress, though, to see if all of that functionality gets integrated into the mainstream FLTK distribution at some point, which might change my mind about using it. TurboVNC's Win32 viewer is very popular, and in order to get away with replacing it, I'd have to replace it with something that is virtually indistinguishable from the original. I think that can be accomplished with GTK. It probably could with wxW as well. My main issue with wxW is that the SDK isn't readily available in binary form on Mac and Linux. Most Linux distros ship GTK, and it's available in MacPorts. Our current Win32 viewer uses 100% pure Win32 calls, and the only reason why it's maintainable is that I haven't moved anything around relative to TightVNC 1.3.x (which is what it was originally based on.) If I need to add a GUI element to the Options dialog, for instance, I have to manually go into the resource file and calculate the coordinates and spacing by hand. I'd really love to break the Connection options into multiple tabs at some point, but I don't dare touch it as long as it's pure Win32. Ultimately, the beneficiary of this hypothetical project would be primarily Linux users, since they're the ones who are stuck using the antiquated Xt GUI. But if it doesn't bother anyone enough to pay for it, it doesn't bother me enough to do anything about it. Maintaining both the Xt and Win32 viewers has not really been a problem for me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't let slow site performance ruin your business. Deploy New Relic APM Deploy New Relic app performance management and know exactly what is happening inside your Ruby, Python, PHP, Java, and .NET app Try New Relic at no cost today and get our sweet Data Nerd shirt too! http://p.sf.net/sfu/newrelic-dev2dev _______________________________________________ VirtualGL-Devel mailing list VirtualGL-Devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/virtualgl-devel
