Introduction and toolkit abstraction

[Mike Hearn]

  > Indeed. As a user, I choose KDE. Why do I get this strange file 
dialog when
> use app X. Oh, its gimp you know, it is different. And then again with 
> gnome meeting. And then again with Open Office. And then again with 
> Mozilla.

Maybe the best solution is simply for someone to sit down and write a 
library which abstracts common dialog boxes. Most of them have very 
restricted interfaces (get a colour, show a file dialog with filters XYZ 
etc) and while you would lose functionality for many projects it may be 
enough.

So, you could write a patch for the Gimp to use libdialogkit or 
whatever, and when the conditions were right it'd go on a separate 
codepath and use that.

I don't think there's any magic way to solve this except by special 
casing applications. Many apps customize the dialog or expect an API 
that can't be perfectly emulated when implemented in terms of something 
else.