minwin

[Jari-Matti Mäkelä]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> Tomas Lindquist Olsen wrote:
>> Ultimate++ is a window less GUI toolkit. Everything is written from
>> "scratch" and only the TopWindow has a native handle. They are working
>> on skinning in the latest dev releases (which btw have some nice
>> features and are pretty stable).
> 
> Thanks.  I think both approaches have merit.  Sometimes you really just
> want to make a custom widget that draws itself and will work immediately
> on every platform (then emulation==good).  But other times you really
> want to have the native look-and-feel (then wrapping==good).  Other
> times you just want to have a consistent look or theme across all
> platforms (then emulation==good).  But some particular things like file
> dialogs tend to easier on users if they are native (then wrapping==good).

Some platforms don't have one native look-and-feel. On one of my Linux
desktops I have quite equal amount of programs written in 7 different
toolkits: fltk, gtk+ 1 and 2, qt, motif, swing and custom toolkits (e.g.
blender). Then, of course there are also those ugly plain X apps, but
does anyone really use them. Luckily the fltk & gtk+ 1 -programs are
some day "upgrading" their toolkits to some more common one. For example
XMMS is being replaced by BMP and Audacious.

Then there are those less common desktop environments that have pretty
minimalistic native toolkits.

I just hope that one day someone makes a general purpose toolkit for all
the environments and for all kinds of users. And with the help of
metaprogramming it just might be possible to create that without too
much bloat. A great potential killer app for D. :)