Re: Renaissance was (Re: Menu (Was: Re: Unimplemented AppKit classes))

[Alan West]

Martin Häcker wrote:

> > I think the idea of a platform independant UI description is very 
> > possible, one of the things that is often different between platforms 
> > is sizes of standard controls, borders, spacing etc... if the UI 
> > description avoided specific sizes but instead described a size such 
> > as; normal, small, medium, large, xlarge, and as a last resort 
> > percentages, then maybe each backend could relate these sizes to 
> > their platform specific style, even on PDAs.
>
>
> I do not completely agree with you on this topic.
>
> I think that one of the strengths of Next/GnuStep/Apple is that its 
> interface is positioned pixel by pixel and thus the developer has full 
> control over where and how the interface elements are positioned.
>
> To loose this would mean to loose something big as auto-layouted 
> interfaces can never look as good as hand crafted well thought out and 
> fixed ones.
>
> (Just think about internationalization issues...)
>
> Though I may be at a loss of the features of .gsmarkup here.

Once you have a higher level description of what controls are required 
in a window, you can then write autolayout modules for the specific 
platforms GNUstep supports. A Mac would follow a lot of the Aqua user 
interface guidelines without a developer bothering to even think about 
Apple's guidelines... Then if GNUstep have documented UI guidelines, it 
too could have its own autolayout module... It enables crossplatform 
apps to look consistent with the native platform their running on.

Imagine a simple message box with an 'OK' and 'Cancel' button, on 
Windows those buttons would be aligned in the centre, on a Mac those 
buttons may be aligned to the right of the window.

Internationalization is one of the largest benefits of a higher level 
user interface description, as the auto-layouter can adjust the whole 
window so text labels never get truncated.

Imagine a user who requires all text on the screen to be at least a 
specific size as they are visually impaired, the auto-layout mechanism 
can deal with that for every app which uses it, without the developer 
ever even thinking of supporting Accessibility requirements. If you used 
specific sizes - this visually imparied person may not be able to use 
your app, or you would have to write support for it to be enlarged.

.xul and .gsmarkup files allow user interfaces to be very dynamic just 
like Objective-C allows your objects to be very dynamic. It could also 
be the file which gets changed when a user changes an option about 
hiding a toolbar, imagine a large graphical ERP system where users have 
different roles and security requirements - somone could visually tailor 
the dialog views for goups of users or specific users, those views could 
even be stored in the database - so they always see their configured 
forms from any client machine linked to the ERP system.

Dohhhh spent too much time writing this instead of NSToolbar.   :-(

cya
Alan