[Haskell-beginners] Re: Selecting a GUI toolkit

[Peter Verswyvelen]

Well, cross-platform toolkits could work if they don't provide widgets as
first class objects :-) So never allow specifying the GUI widgets and layout
directly, only indirectly.
So you basically provide just the model and some hints/constraints and let
the GUI toolkit automatically generate native look&feel widgets to present
and edit the model. This means the GUI toolkit needs to understand and
implement the guidelines on each platform (how many GUI developers actually
follow these guidelines 100%?)

If you provide constraints that are conflicting between GUI platforms, you
have to either relax the constraints or provide different widgets for each
platform.

All nice theoretically, but not done yet?

On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 5:55 PM, Thomas Davie <tom.davie at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is one of many reasons why I don't believe any of these cross-platform
> toolkits will ever be good enough to make truly native-like UIs – The bottom
> line is that tab views are different between Mac OS and other OSes, they
> have much more padding round them on Mac OS.  This means that any layout you
> create involving them will never work on both platforms.
>
> Bob
>
>
> On 1 May 2009, at 17:25, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
>
>  Peter Verswyvelen wrote:
>>
>>> I thought wxWidgets was actually one of the only toolkits that actually
>>> *used* the native GUI libraries???
>>> See e.g. http://wiki.wxwidgets.org/WxWidgets_Compared_To_Other_Toolkits
>>>
>>> So I don't understand how come the look and feel is different then...
>>>
>>
>> Using native GUI libraries is necessary, but not sufficient for
>> achieving the same look and feel. :)
>>
>> Other elements are layout and spacing,
>>
>>  http://developer.apple.decenturl.com/human-interface-guidelines-layout
>>  http://developer.apple.decenturl.com/hi-guidelines-windows
>>
>> drag & drop,
>>
>>  http://developer.apple.decenturl.com/hi-guidelines-dragndrop
>>
>> writing style and fonts
>>
>>  http://developer.apple.decenturl.com/human-interface-guidelines-text
>>
>> etc, etc.
>>
>>
>> Daniel Carrera wrote:
>>
>>> Thirdly, the textlogs have different fonts. Again, the wxHaskell one
>>>> looks non-standard.
>>>>
>>>>  Honestly, I can't tell. They are both very similar, sans fonts. Also,
>>> the
>>> font could  be explained by the fact that these screen shots are taken on
>>> different computers (different OS versions, different settings).
>>>
>>
>> There is a default set of fonts
>>
>>  http://developer.apple.decenturl.com/human-interface-guidelines-text
>>
>> The "mini system font" is the typography of choice for text boxes, but
>> it looks the "application font" is acceptable as well.
>>
>>  In any case, I think these differences are minor.
>>>
>>
>> I don't. :)
>>
>>  More importantly, I'm not sure that a different cross-platform
>>> toolkit would do a better job.
>>>
>>
>> True, that. It's just that this doesn't mean that wxWidgets does a very
>> good job.
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>> apfelmus
>>
>> --
>> http://apfelmus.nfshost.com
>>
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