Re: Camaelon <-> GNUstep

[Helge Hess]

On Sep 3, 2006, at 21:56, Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> Just for the record  ... my position on theming in GNUstep has  
> *always* been that it's a good idea, and I believe that all core  
> GNustep developers have held that position for a long, long time.    
> I have (some considerable time ago) merged in horizontal menu  
> support for a more MacOS-like theme, and offered to assit/work-on  
> merging camealon code into gui.

I very much agree with what you wrote here.


However, I fear that theming is not really a solution to the issue of  
vertical vs horizontal menus. That is, just showing a vertical menu  
in a horizontal way is not enough to make a usable app (one which  
pleases the user).

A vertical menu makes the menu options easily/directly accessible.  
Its basically used to replace a lot of buttons in the document  
window. A horiz menu is not so. Its hard to access and most often  
used for options which are seldom accessed (like preferences). In  
fact I almost never use the menu on MacOS. All modern  systems which  
have horiz menus therefore _also_ have some form of toolbars to make  
the often used options directly accessible.

So when writing an app which is supposed to work in both systems, you  
basically need to have two UIs. One which acknowledges the unique  
usability of vertical menus and one which has the hacks (toolbars) to  
make horiz ones usable :-)


Well, and as outlined by others theming is not really an option for  
cross-platform GUI either (partly for the same reasons). That theming  
sucks for that purpose was very well demonstrated by Java and Mozilla  
(and YellowBox too). Which is why we have Mozilla forks like Camino.


I think the solution to both issues is Renaissance aka XUL. Plus per- 
platform/system snippets to make two UIs for one apps easy to do.
Personally I would *very much prefer* being able to use Gorm (with  
enhanced capabilities, like Renaissance) as an IB replacement on  
MacOS than being able to read IB files on GNUstep!

Possibly GNUstep could gain access to more users/developers by first  
writing free software applications for MacOS. Like GNUmail. Viable  
iCal, Addressbook, Finder, Safari , Xcode, IB, Preview etc  
replacements. Once we've replaced the apps we can start replacing the  
environment ;-) This is roughly the way GNU became what it is (we had  
GCC, gmake, Emacs on commercial OS'es a long time before GNU OS'es  
like Linux).
Now I understand that most GNUstep contributors are not interested in  
this, but it might be a viable way to reach the desktop-environment  
goal ;-)


Having said all that I think that theming is still something which  
would be quite useful. But theming is almost exclusively changing  
colors and such. Its unlikely to work out if it hooks into  
application UI organization.

Greets,
  Helge

PS: in fact I think both menu styles are very useful. On small  
screens like a notebook I very much prefer horiz ones and on large  
screens (20" as we usually have on the desktops nowadays) the  
verticals are much better.
--
Helge Hess
http://docs.opengroupware.org/Members/helge/