Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Krishna]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Richard Frith-Macdonald
<richard@tiptree.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> On 29 Oct 2008, at 13:56, Jesse Ross wrote:
>
>>> Fred, Riccardo, Adam and I have been working on Windows lately and it's
>>> now more stable than ever.   A good windows theme might help, but actually
>>> some of the color schemes we already have work very well indeed.
>>
>> I agree that allowing for native-appearing GNUstep apps under Windows is a
>> great idea... but I don't think that's doable in the context of a theme.
>> Theming support is essential for GNUstep (obviously), but with Windows, I
>> think we need to really be using native widgets. There are just so many ways
>> that a Windows machine can be customized visually, that a theme will almost
>> always feel out of place (not to mention what we make that GNUstep theme
>> look like: XP or Vista or... something else). I have no idea how this would
>> be done technically, but it's most certainly the best way to give the feel
>> of a truly native application.
>
> True integration with windows widgets is (line integration with X widgets)
> almost impossible without essentially throwing away gui/back altogether.
>
> My concept of theming (as described in the theme documentation in GNUstep)
> was to have something a good deal more powerful than conventional themes
> though, and while it can't be perfect it could do a lot better than you
> might expect.
> The idea was to have three levels of operation that a theme bundle could
> make use of:
> 1. setting user defaults to change colors and implement limited behavior
> changes (menu style, window decoration etc) which are already built in to
> GNUstep.
> 2. painting gui elements using tiled images (like camealon)
> 3. new code in the bundle to handle drawing and change class behavior.
>
> The first two parts of this should be usable by designers with no coding
> knowledge, but the third obviously requires programming skills.
>
> My thought was that a windows theme would operate largely at the third
> level, though it could make use of the other stuff.  For instance, it could
> make itsself aware of changes to the ms-windows native theme that happens to
> be in operation, and update drawing of the gnustep app in response to native
> theme changes.  It might be able to draw test widgets using the native APIs,
> then grab pixmap information from them and use that pixmap information to
> draw the gnustep gui elements etc.  And of course it could also replace the
> implementation of particular gnustep user interface element with wrappers
> for native widgets in any place where that's actually enough of an advantage
> to justify the work.
>


http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms534865.aspx - Will this help?

Cheers,
-Krishna

-- 
Why make things difficult, when it is possible to make them cryptic
and totally illogical, with just a little bit more effort?
 -  Aksel Peter Jorgensen