|
From: | Iain Hallam |
Subject: | Re: Question about the "look" of GNUstep |
Date: | Thu, 07 Feb 2002 16:12:36 +0000 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win98; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011011 |
anstouh@yahoo.com.au wrote:
On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, JW wrote:I'm just wondering if there's any plans, works in progress or hopes to "upgrade" GNUstep's "looks", add theme support or anything to make it look a little nicer, more modern?
As I understand the previous discussion on this topic a while ago, themes would be welcomed (as long as the default look were to be kept as NeXT) but would have to be implemented very carefully. I believe that a good example of this is the Amiga's GUI system, ReAction. It's based on the idea that anyone can code a drop-in replacement for a current widget and just replace the <widget>.class file. The problem with this is that each method needs to be implemented anew, so there might be some use in a prototypical widget for each class. This way, each widget draws itself when called. Otherwise, you're going to be stretching bitmaps all over the place. (N.B., this could be done with a vector format like SVG, in which case there wouldn't be so much overhead, and it would probably look better.)
Is there any possibility of using QT/KDE widgets, maybe via some sort of binding/wrapper/bridge or whatever you want to call it? I'm wild over Aqua but I'm sure due to Apple's harsh legal actions in the past, anything that looks remotely like Aqua on a non-Apple platform it totally "out". IMHO KDE is the second nicest looking thing after Aqua, that's why I thought I'd mention it.
<snip>
The GNUstep UI is divided into two parts, and it's the backend that determines the display, I understand. A new backend could be written that used KDE widgets to display stuff. I got this knowledge from the question about the application kit being implemented in GTK in the GNUstep faq. Of course, if I'm wrong, don't fry me, this is just what I got from the faq! I'm just wondering---how would menus be implement if such an idea were adopted? Would they come up as standard GTK/KDE/Windows/Motif/Whatever menus, or would they be NeXTSTEP-style ones in a GTK/KDE/Windows/ Motif/Whatever widget-style? Also, if it was implemented, it'd obey the theme rules of the thing it was coded as, would it? If I had MacOS-style menu bars in KDE, I'd get MacOS-style menu bars in GNUstep apps, yes?
Implementing a whole new backend would be different from providing theme support (Disclaimer: IANAGP (I Am Not A GNUStep Programmer) ) It would , however, be a good way of integrating GNUStep with other environments, like KDE, or even Motif. GNUStep has its own ways of drawing things when it is installed alone (what's that distribution that does this?) but could target other environments when installed alongside them.
- Iain.P.S. If I've got things wrong here, feel free to correct me - I've not been through the code yet :-)
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |