Re: GUI without X11 / Artist Help

[M. Uli Kusterer]

At 10:50 Uhr +0100 18.02.2005, Riccardo wrote:
> I like its compactness and find tabs one of the "biggest" controls in aqua.

 Are you talking about the old or the new tabs in Aqua? Because the 
new ones are about the size of GNUstep's right now. Of course, they 
don't look like tabs at all anymore, which is my main gripe these 
days.

> on the other hand, it is almost impossible to accomodate 800x600 
> screens like my ibook, to 1152 or 1280 screens and more with one 
> size. I wouldn't "bother" at the current state of gnustep.

 Well, if the cut-off stuff is resolved, and with a PrefPane that 
allows specifying some brighter colors, I guess I could live with it. 
I'd have to see how the cut-off stuff's been fixed, I guess. I guess 
we disagree on this point: At least in the case of tabs, I would call 
the compactness crammedness. But then I have a 1024x768 screen, and 
that may just be the point at which the advantage in readability 
exceeds the disadvantage in unavailable screen real estate. Or maybe 
we just have different preferences...

> I think "resizeable" widgets should come one day. But I have nevr 
> seen an OS do it right. MacOS is one extreme: all controls, menu 
> bars are of a fixed size. WIndows on the other hand makes several 
> think resizeable. But the effect IMHO is sooooo bad that I would 
> ignore the issue right now.

 Agreed. I've yet to see a resizable implementation that works. 
Renaissance is a nice attempt, but it'll still not look as 
aesthetically sound as a GUI hand-nudged by someone who knows his 
whitespace. But it's much too early for GNUstep to worry about stuff 
like that. Renaissance is a great foundation to build on once we have 
more apps. And who knows, we may come up with some layout algorithms 
that make everything look prettier.

> InterfaceBuilder here gives many hooks and places controls of the 
> correct size and eases the spacing among them. Gorm is nto so 
> advanced here.
> For example when moving more than one control or resizing a window, 
> I get no guidelines, so it often happens to compact controls and 
> borders too much...

 I'm actually talking less about Gorm doing that. ResEdit in MacOS 9 
didn't have *any* guidelines (as in, blue lines that indicate that 
you're 6 pixels from a window's edge or so), and still people got 
consistent metrics, because Apple's HIG specified them, and 
developers (mostly) honored them. Does the GNUstep HIG specify any 
metrics?

 Does anyone have a URL for the GNUstep (OpenStep?) Human Interface 
Guidelines? I couldn't find one in Google.
--
Cheers,
M. Uli Kusterer
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