D2 GUI Libs

[Bill Baxter]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Lars T. Kyllingstad
<public at kyllingen.nospamnet> wrote:
> dsimcha wrote:
>>
>> == Quote from retard (re at tard.com.invalid)'s article
>>>
>>> Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:10:24 +0000, dsimcha wrote:
>>>>
>>>> 2.  Native look and feel.  IMHO this is very overrated.  I've never
>>>> found that a Java-ish or GTK-ish or whatever look and feel instead of a
>>>> native Win32 look and feel got in the way of me using a program
>>>> effectively.
>>>
>>> The win32 look and feel doesn't look native on linux/mac/solaris.
>>
>> Right, the implication here was that I mostly use Windows and I've never
>> really
>> cared if an application I use has a GTK-ish or Swing-ish or whatever look
>> and
>> feel, as long as the application is well-coded, responsive and does what I
>> need.
>> I'm speaking purely from personal opinion/experience here, but I don't
>> understand
>> why people care so much about platform-native look and feel as long as it
>> works
>> and is usable.
>
> I think native look and feel is a lot more important in, say, a web browser
> or a word processor. I don't care so much about which GUI toolkits Gnuplot
> or Mathematica use...

Non-native file dialogs which are bizarro (like gtk) or underpowered
(like some Java ones) are the main thing that drive me crazy.  There's
a lot of nice stuff built into the native Windows file dialogs.  It's
very annoying when some non-native app takes all that away.

Also there are standard key-bindings.  Though probably any non-native
app could be made to follow the platform conventions, the chances that
a non-native LAF app will fail here are generally greater.  On Windows
these are things like Alt-F4 to close app.  Ctrl-F4 or Ctrl-W to close
a sub-window or document.  Ctrl-Tab to navigate tabs of a
notebook-like widget, etc.   Also the way Alt works on Windows for
controlling menus is something I've seen non-native apps futzing.

So basically I don't care much about non-native *look*, it's the
non-native *feel* I find annoying.

--bb