[GUI] Native Look and Feel

[Wolfgang Thaller]

Adrian Hey <ahey@iee.org> wrote:

> Native "Look and Feel"
> ----------------------
> Others will disagree, personally I don't care much about this.
> Having a "quality look and feel" is important I think, but
> whether or not it looks like every other App on a particular
> platform seems unimportant to me.

That's what (almost) all X11 users and most Windows users think. They 
may be right, but on the Mac, the User Interface Laws are considered 
holy...
If I want to write a GUI program for my Mac, native look-and-feel is 
essentially a precondition. If a toolkit doesn't support a native Mac 
look and feel, it simply solves the wrong problem for me.

Duplicating the Mac look and feel exactly has never worked with 
cross-platform toolkits. Yes, I maintain that Java Swing is still a 
failure for Mac OS, although it looks and feels much better than it 
used to. I happily use Java-based programs on Linux or on Windows, but 
when I have to use them on the Mac, they just feel out-of-place (even 
if they already look _almost_ right). It's just no joy using them.

Sorry for being negative, I just had to provide a MacOS-centric point 
of view here.

Cheers,

Wolfgang