From: John <john_ludlow@...>
Date: 2006-04-07T19:45:25+09:00
Subject: Re: is GUI a weak point?

Chris Alfeld wrote:
> It's not so much that X11 is bad; it's good to have it available and
> actually does a good job of running X11 concurrently with OS X.  But
> it's just so disappointing.  Besides the memory/CPU cost/startup time
> it emphasises that this is a limited port of an application written
> for another architecture.  Although this applications work fine under
> X11.app the keys are different (than actual OS X apps), the appearance
> is different, the focus model may not be what they expect...

I see.  I've only tried it on Windows and, bar a few quirks, it's quite 
good - a million times better than Tk on Windows at least.  Take, for 
example, the list box.  Under Ruby/Tk, the list box is essentially a 
text box with a list of items - one per line, and clicking a line 
selects that whole line.  You can't tap a key to go to an item beginning 
with that letter (you can in FxRuby), and scollbars have to be manually 
attached to a host control.  But, oh, they can't just be connected, no, 
that would be too simple.  They have to be put on the form as a seperate 
control.  But then you have to think about how that scrollbar docks to 
the side of the listbox, so a frame is needed to make sure the controls 
line up correctly, and then you have to tell it to act as a scrollbar 
for the listbox, and also tell it to change the size of the thumb based 
on the contents of the listbox.

I didn't even attempt to build a tree.  I ported my Rake dependency tool 
to FxRuby, and found it ridiculously easy to build a dialog with a 
couple of trees which do the job of the Tk version far better.  It has a 
file browse dialog (which the Tk version didn't) to load the rakefile, 
and even a search capability.

And not to mention the fact that it just looks better - it looks more 
like a Windows app, which is good on Windows.

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