Re: Renaissance menus on OS X ?

[Nicola Pero]

> > PS: Is anyone else out there using this stuff yet ? If not then I seriously
> >     recommend it. It would be realy nice if all the Apps could be moved over
> >     to this rather than using gorm or gmodel files.
> 
> Can I have a Pop-Up (with connections) in  English 
> and a Pop-Up (with connections) + a TextField (without connections)  in Fench
> for exemple.

I'm not sure what the question is, but nothing stops you from having a
separate .gsmarkup file for English, and a separate .gsmarkup file for
French if you so need (and if you have that much time to spend), exactly
in the same way as .gorm files.


> I'm not sure that an AutoLayout allow that apps looks good in any
> language.

Consider that most of what you see on any desktop software on any platform
is built using autolayout.  Definitely any gtk, qt, mozilla, ... software
is built using autolayout.  Some of them are pretty, some of them are
horrible, most of them are average.

Generally, I don't think it's autolayout that makes things horrible --
it's programmers with no attention to details (wrong borders, wrong expand
flags, etc); it's programmers drawing horrible images, choosing horrible
colors, putting widgets in the wrong positions, with no sense of
proportions etc.  It's not really the autolayout system which is
generating the horrible windows -- the autolayout system is just doing
what the programmer tells it to do -- it's the programmer who is
generating the horrible monsters.

I personally find that autolayout helps me building simple, consistent and
logical relationships between the objects, resulting in a better
organization and clearer layout.  If the autolayout system helps you by
automatically choosing consistent and standard borders and flags, it can
help the programmer produce windows of good standard quality without a
need for paranoic attention to details or superior graphical skills.

Anyway, I don't believe the fact that MacOSX and NeXTstep look so good is
due to absolute positioning of widgets.  They look so good because very
good graphical designers have worked intensively on it. :-)

You can have *horrible* windows with absolute positioning of widgets, in
the same way as you can have *very* pretty windows with autolayout.

The 'adjustments' done by autolayout are normally a few pixels here and
there, and the alignments and organizations and proportions of the widgets
are kept in the adjustment process.  Autolayout does not destroy your
windows, it just adjusts a few pixels around, and makes sure that the
basic layout characteristics are kept unchanged (alignment, relative
positioning etc).

Normally, it's what you yourself would do if you did the adjustment
manually, yet it's done mechanically and systematically, which saves you a
lot of work and trouble.

Generally, I very happily trade a few pixels of difference in layout
(which I nearly don't notice, and I would have to add them manually when
translating or porting anyway) with the resulting power and flexibility
and reduced development time.

If the user enlarges a window, the system does a lot of autolayout and
adjustments anyway to reposition the widgets for the new window size (even
on a .gorm window).  And still, if I make a Mac OSX window larger, I can't
see this horrible degradation of graphical quality.  Usually a lot of
blank space appears, but that's not really because of autolayout, it's
because the window has been made too big.