On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 21:56:17 +0100, "Thorsten Froehlich"
<tho### [at] trfde> wrote:

>I am not sure which way to read this.  Either way, Mac OS never had anything
>like windows inside windows.

You're right it does not. What I meant was that the menu was on top,
then the workspace covered the screen and inside the workspace were
the work windows & palettes. That's how I seem to remember it.

>I am not sure which way to read this.

Sorry, I was unclear. See below.

>Does GIMP have windows inside windows in its Mac OS X port?

Nope. But it doesn't have a background workspace either. And the way
menus work, the way window focus works (in PhotoShop the image windows
is always in focus) as well as the way shortcuts *don't* work if the
image window is blurred, all of those are literally killers for work
flow and useability.

>That would imply it is one of those crappy Trolltech
>Qt framework applications.

Not the GIMP :). The GIMP was the reason to come up with GTK and Gnome
in the first place. GTK, around which Gnome is based on, stands for
the Gimp ToolKit (or something similar). Basically GIMP was first
based on MOTIF, which was at the time commercial (no LessTiff yet) and
the developers designed their own framework which later became the
base of Gnome (mainly because it was free, as opposed to Qt)

>Note that the Trolltech Qt framework does not draw system windows.
>It draws everything itself and provides a miserable user experience on
>both Windows and Mac OS X whenever it tries to emulate things not 
>available on the platform natively (or the GUI changes like with
>Windos XP or less so in Mac OS X 10.3).

Would you mind sharing some experience over email? Qt is one of the
frameworks I am currently focusing my attention at, and of course the
only stuff I can find online are praises (marketing, you know...) I'd
love to hear from someone who have burned their fingers with it as a
developer and/or as a user.

BTW every single cross-platform framework that I have ever considered
- Java, wxWindows, GTK+, Qt has had quite a bash from you -- are they
really that bad and is there one that doesn't have their problems?

>On Mac OS applications that do not
>follow the look and feel of the system will be avoided by users like hell,
>and they tend to get bad reviews unless the reviewer was paid or is no
>regular Mac OS user.

I know. This is my biggest nightmare at the moment. I have to design a
GUI for Windows/Mac (and eventually Linux, but Linux GUI is by
definition not well defined :) ) that:
  a) is stylish and elegant,
  b) looks native on both platforms
  c) is not as choppy and blocky as Windows
  d) is not as balooney, colorful and slightly childish as MacOS X
  e) is coherent in a cross-platform user environment (meaning minimal
switching effort between the  Win and Mac versions)

>Well, ever notice the "Mac"-mode of Photoshop for Windows that places the
>menu bar at the top of the screen and makes the root window cover
>everything?

When one PhotoShops, one barely does much else in parallel so it
totally makes sense that way. I shudder at the thought of having NO
workspace and having to find, for example, the Lasso tool on screen
with all the mess of windows in the background (normally chess,
winamp, ICQ, email, Agent, some browsers, Acrobat Reader) with nothing
to cover them while I am actually photoshopping.

I am sure that with the right window manager I can get the same from
the GIMP running in a nested server fullscreen (in KDE - borderless
window). I just have to find one that allows the menubar on top of the
screen and is not as ugly as my ex-mother-in-law.

Really, if you feel you have the time for some more discussion on the
subject, please drop me a line. I'm always open to others' experience
and points of view.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] vipbg
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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