[REBOL] Re: What's native?
From: carl:cybercraft at: 24-Jun-2004 23:48
>On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 10:14:33 +1200, Carl Read <[carl--cybercraft--co--nz]>
>wrote:
>
>> One of the complaints I receive about REBOL is it doesn't adopt the
>> look-and-feel of the OS it's running on,
>
>Hi, yep, that's what I hear for xpeers.net as well. We don't need to
>discuss if this is really a show-stopper or not, the fact is, people
>recognize it and make a decision on this perception. That's the bad thing
>about it. The IT guy in a company looks at it and says:
>
> Hmmm... not a standard GUI? Than it's not a standard application and we
>don't use it. Have a nice day.
>
>This takes about 15 seconds. It's a problem, and it makes life hard to use
>Rebol in the business sector. I don't have a solution for this problem.
>IMO emulating a GUI's look & feel to some 80% makes sense.
Have you followed all the posts my original one generated? As to a certain extent they've
changed my mind, in that Web apps are probably the way of the future and they may have
who-knows what kind of GUI showing up in the browser window. Meaning people will get
used to dealing with different kinds of GUIs.
That's the future though. As to emulating GUIs, I think some see it as such a large
job because they think of emulating the whole native GUI and not just a subset of it.
To me it means creating styles that have the look and feel of the equivilent native
widgets, be it buttons, fields, panels or whatever. Some features might have to be
left out, but finding things you can do in one native app that you can't do in another
native app is not that unusual for users.
The biggest problem I think would be text-handling. Being restricted to one font, one
style and one size of text per face is a pretty big restriction. I would guess a style
could be created that'd get around this by using a variable number of faces, but I'm
not too sure how good a performance you could get out of it.
-- Carl Read
