Re: GUI toolkit for Ada again

[Emmanuel Briot <briot@gnat.com>]

Wolfgang Jeltsch <jeltsch@tu-cottbus.de> writes:

> Why do so many people not care about details in GUIs? Just today I 
> installed an application which was said to have "a modern Windows 
> interface". The interface was in my opinion rather terrible - unusual 
> looking scrollbars, non-modal dialogs where there should be modal ones, 
> push button rows below the menu bar and so on, and so on.

Except maybe for the scrollbars, none of what you describe above (modal
dialogs, push buttons, ...) has anything to do with the GUI toolkit that
is used. The GUI toolkit can only help the visual drawing (like how the
border of buttons, or the radio buttons,... are displayed), not what you
put in your window.

The application you describe above might have been written with Win32, for all
we know, and still have that look you don't like.

There's only so much a GUI toolkit can help you with, unless it becomes so
restrictive that you can't do anything with it in the end.

Also don't tell us that the Windows look-and-feel is what Microsoft does, since
they keep (rightly) changing it. If you use their new menu system (with hidden
items) on windows98, it will look strange. But it is still considered as a
windows look-and-feel.


> Ok, obviously there is no such library I am looking for. I think I will 
> begin to write one when I have time. The existence of wxWindows proves that 
> it is possible to have a library fulfilling the requirements I have.
> IMPORTANT: If someone of you is interested in participating in this project 
> please tell me.

This is a huge project, especially if you want to do it portable at the same time.
Why not provide a binding to wxWindows instead. Actually, I even think there is
one somewhere around, but I might be mistaken. 

Emmanuel