Re: Native widgets (was: Re: So, honestly, is GNUStep a viable development option?)

[Fred Kiefer]

Nicolas Roard wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2007 2:16 PM, Mark Grice <markjoel60@gmail.com> wrote:
>> But dialog boxes are a prime example of what would be better if it
>> were native. For example: Ubuntu has Samba, which allows me to get to
>> the windows drives on my network. It also allows me to view thumbnails
>> of the graphic images. Their file dialog box supports these out of the
>> box... As a developer, it would be nice if my file chooser
>> automatically gave these kinds of options to my end users. I am
>> assuming that the native GNUStep does not, because when I run the
>> examples, I can neither see thumbnails of images, nor can I access my
>> SMB files... But that may be ignorance on my part...
> 
> Yes, file chooser should use the native one.

I don't agree here. Using native file chooser or other common dialog
panels will be break the look and feel of a GNUstep application. OK, you
may not like this look and feel, but at least within an application it
should be consistent. Using native dialog panels would also inhibit the
accessory view mechanism, not that we are doing that great with it
currently.
It would be fairly easy to add native dialog panels on windows, but how
would you do it on Unix systems? We have different ones for KDE and
Gnome, other environments don't even provide a shared one. What kind of
consistency would we gain by using a KDE (or QT) file chooser in a Gnome
environment?

What we could try to do is move the gui code for these dialog panels
into NIB files (or Gorm files if you are a bit old fashioned :-) and
thereby offer the opportunity to replace them with layouts more suited
for the current environment. Anybody interested in taking this task? It
will be a great chance to learn more about Gorm.

Fred