Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Nick Sabalausky]

On Mon, 20 May 2013 13:49:28 -0700
"Adam Wilson" <flyboynw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> And my point is that your assertion that it can never be done is
> patently untrue. If MS can do it, there is no technical barrier to
> FOSS doing it, other than our own mental conception of what we are
> capable of. The point about WPF is that the system is so flexible in
> it's rendering that you can precisely emulate any native OS toolkit,
> or go off in a completely new direction. I prefer that flexibility as
> a UI designer.
> 

I still have a hard time believing that it's realistic for it take take
everything into account. *Even* if you go to all the effort to make
every render and behavior pixel-perfect, you're *still* failing to
account for all of the following things, all of which actually *exist*:

- Software to allow the user to custom-reskin the system. Yes, even on
  Windows this exists, and has for a looong time. Getting a third-party
  GUI toolkit compatible with this would likely be quite difficult, if
  even possible.

- On windows, I use a program called KatMouse that allows me to scroll
  any control by just pointing at it and using my mouse's scroll-wheel.
  No need to manually "focus" the control before the retarded Win system
  allows me to scroll it. This is literally my #1 favorite windows
  program. But this obviously doesn't work on programs that merely
  *emulate* the system's look-and-feel, no matter how meticulous the
  emulation. Hell, even the UI changes in "native" MS-developed Vista
  and Win7 break it at least half the time.

- Tools to reveal the value behind "******"-filled password boxes.
  Sounds like a black-hat tool, but I've personally had legitimate
  need to use it.

- Anything else that involves either GUI-introspection or adding a
  cross-application UI feature. There's plenty of other
  entirely valid use-cases.

Unless I'm mistaken, these sorts of things *cannot* be handled by a
non-native UI without either the given utility special-casing every
specific UI toolkit out there, or the UI toolkit (somehow)
special-casing every such tool/utility. Neither approach is scalable
enough to be a real solution. Ultimately, there must be *some* common
system-wide UI, without cheaters, so that cross-cutting features are
*realistically* possible and not inherently unreliable.

Of course, you could say that such uses aren't important, but I'd very
strongly disagree.