Re: Renaissance was (Re: Menu (Was: Re: Unimplemented AppKit classes))

[Martin Häcker]

> Imagine a simple message box with an 'OK' and 'Cancel' button, on 
> Windows those buttons would be aligned in the centre, on a Mac those 
> buttons may be aligned to the right of the window.

Well I do agree to you that on many fronts this sounds tempting and 
of course many small things could be automated that way.

> Internationalization is one of the largest benefits of a higher 
> level user interface description, as the auto-layouter can adjust 
> the whole window so text labels never get truncated.

But this I have to disagree. I am one of the localizers of Fire 
(fire.sf.net) and I constantly run into issues (though they might 
seem small at first) where no autolayout I could imagine would help 
me to solve them.

Instead it is careful twiddling with the many parameters that are at 
hand that only leads to the desired results of a nice, usable, 
informative and easy UI.

Well... there is the possibility that my imagination is just too 
bound to my current tools, but I am very skeptical that an 
autolayouter can solve those Issues the same way that I can go at 
them: with my imagination.

> Imagine a user who requires all text on the screen to be at least a 
> specific size as they are visually impaired, the auto-layout 
> mechanism can deal with that for every app which uses it, without 
> the developer ever even thinking of supporting Accessibility 
> requirements. If you used specific sizes - this visually imparied 
> person may not be able to use your app, or you would have to write 
> support for it to be enlarged.

(I know this is a rant, but I like the accessibility features of OS X 
better for that purpose. Of course you can talk to me about this in 
private)

> Dohhhh spent too much time writing this instead of NSToolbar.   :-(

Shame on you... :)

<going back to learning more obj-c>

cu Martin
--
dont.wanna.tell
[ot]coder - hehe