Introduction and toolkit abstraction

[Thomas Leonard]

On Wed, Sep 01, 2004 at 12:59:04AM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 10:30:21PM -0400, Sean Middleditch wrote:
[...]
> > GNOME uses instant-change preferences (yay) while many non-GNOME apps
> > use the ok/apply/cancel hodge-podge - how could the toolkit abstract
> > that away?
> 
> Sounds tricky.

I guess programs using Apply would be happy to change if they had a
configuration system that supported instant-apply easily. Is there any
style guide which prefers Apply buttons on UI grounds? ROX switched over a
few years ago, and it was a big improvement.

> > Is it just going to abstract GNOME and KDE, or GNOME, KDE, ROX, GNUStep,
> > OS X, etc?
> 
> Start simple: use the file dialogs from KDE in GNOME, or the GNOME ones in
> KDE.  If you can do that, you win points.  If you can do more, you win more
> points.

Many, many points if you make the API allow ROX saveboxes too. We allow
saving to locations besides files (eg, into other documents and
applications), so the savebox works with streams, not (just) pathnames.

(there's a brief summary at the end of this:
http://www.freedesktop.org/bin/view/Main/Draganddropwarts#Conclusions)


-- 
Thomas Leonard			http://rox.sourceforge.net
tal00r at ecs.soton.ac.uk	tal197 at users.sourceforge.net
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