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Cross-platform GUI development

bramble cadet.bramble at gmail.com
Thu Oct 25 10:17:02 EDT 2007 
On Oct 25, 6:32 am, "Chris Mellon" <arka... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 10/24/07, bramble <cadet.bram... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In the end, GTK+ is themable, and it's a free software project, so if
> > the MS Windows port has warts, anyone can come along and polish it up
> > for that platform.
>
> There's been plenty to say about this in the past, so I will be brief:
> Being able to use the native theme API is necessary but not sufficient
> for native look and feel. Gtk doesn't even try for anything other than
> a cursory attempt at "look", and as far as I know doesn't have any
> real interest in doing so.
>
> I don't have any problem than that, but I don't like people
> misrepresenting what you get from using Gtk.

Sorry, I didn't mean to misrepresent GTK+. I clumsily jammed 2 ideas
into one sentence: one, that theming can mitigate some issues with
differences in L&F ("look and feel"), and two, that it's free
software, so contributors can try and make the L&F more native if it's
really that big a deal.

One reason I'm not crazy about wx because I don't like the idea of
adding yet another API layer into the mix. Wx seems quite large, and
if issues arise, debugging a GUI that calls another GUI does not seem
like a fun way to spend your time. Anyhow, my opinion is, pick one
good enough native GNU/Linux GUI toolkit that the community can
somewhat standardize on (and GTK+/PyGTK seems to fit that bill pretty
well), write your apps in that so they run really well on GNU/Linux
distros, and *then* get your apps running on secondary OS's as-needed.
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