Re: Plotting status in Octave

[Shai Ayal]

> So, uhm... I know talk is cheap without me coding for it, but... why
> fltk? It produces ugly widgets, while Qt produces native-looking
> widgets. I can just imagine the Mac users complaining about plotting
> in Octave because the widgets look ugly. :-/ Qt does have a huge set
> of dependencies, though, plus all that weird macro hackery. Did you
> choose fltk because it's lightweight, or because it integrates nicely
> with OpenGL, or why?

I agree fltk is a bit ugly. However, I chose it (historically in 2003
for octplot) because it's lightweight, and I like lightweight,
especially considering the the toolkit in this context (plotting
window) is really unimportant and not very visible. The interesting
stuff is happening on the canvas. It seemed to me that using some big
toolkit like gtk/qt/wx just so that we can open a window is silly.
Somewwhat more objective reasons for choosing fltk:
at that time, gtk support for windows was very shody (I am not sure
what the status is now)
QT licensing also seemed problematic

Shai