[GUI] Mission Statement + Widgets

[David Sankel]

--- Alastair Reid <alastair@reid-consulting-uk.ltd.uk>
wrote:
> The sadder news is that people programming to these
> constraints or
> designing GUI APIs to these constraints often forget
> that there is
> another way.  Only by implementing and testing the
> design on multiple
> GUI platforms can we really achieve a portable
> design.  

I would tend to agree with you except for the enormous
number of counter-examples:

Qt/Mac was introduced after Qt version 3.0 came out. 
Qt was used for years before the mac port was even
conceptualized.  The API did not change drastically
with the addition of the macintosh platform. (change
from rightclick to contextmenu memberfunctions was
about the only api change).

The Win32 port of GTK+ and gnome was a complete
afterthought of these libraries.  In this case, the
core library interface didn't change at all and was
ported to windows quickly. (ref:
http://216.239.57.100/search?q=cache:V3R1bwF33FEC:lists.ximian.com/archives/public/glade-users/2002-April/001535.html+announce+gtk%2B+windows&hl=en&start=7&ie=UTF-8)

When Motif was designed, window's didn't even exist. 
Yet, we still have 4 commercial libraries that allow
motif code to run on windows.  (ref:
http://www.rahul.net/kenton/GettingMotif.html)

The list goes on and on: XFree86 and various X11
libraries for windows, OpenGL which came from IRIX and
has been everywhere, OpenInventer which has commercial
windows implementations, tcl/tk is perhaps one of the
best examples, fltk (www.fltk.org), . . .

David J. Sankel