[MLUG] Inconsistent Widgets

["Bruce Alspaugh" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

So I do a full install of Red Hat 8.0, go into KDE, and check out the
Bluecurve environment.  It looks nice at first, but then I notice something:
applications are using different widgets.  Take scroll bars as an example:
Konquerer has three diagonal grooves on the thumbs of its scroll bars.
Mozilla has three horizontal grooves on its scroll bar thumbs.  OpenOffice
Writer doesn't have any grooves at all.  The scroll bars also were slightly
different shades of grey.  Buttons look different too: Mozilla uses rounded
corner buttons, while other applications use square corner buttons.  I tried
using the Theme Manager and discovered some of the applications responded
well to theme changes, while others did nothing.  Menu bars were of
different heights and used different fonts.  I haven't experimented as much
with gnome, but I assume it has similar issues.

As an original Mac programmer going back to 1984, I find the user-interface
inconsistency bothersome.  Widgets had a very consistent look and feel
across applications and were supposed to follow extremely strict guidelines.
Maybe I'm just being too much of a purist, because I have to admit Mac has
lost a lot of the consistency it had in it's early days.  I won't even go
into what Java/Swing widgets look like.  My point is not to start a debate
as to which environment is best, but simply to understand the underlying
software architecture issues behind these inconsistencies.

Is the inconsistency because the developers are programming to different UI
libraries that render their widgets differently?  Why aren't the various
libraries just wrappers for the underlying OS widgets so the OS can define
the look-and-feel?  How hard is it for developers to code their applications
so that the widgets will automatically adapt to the user interface
guidelines and theme settings of their environment, be it KDE, GNOME, IRIX,
Aqua (now that Apple is making X11 available on OS X), etc.?  Do libraries
like GTK, Qt, Motif, help or hinder the consistency issue?  Who defines the
guidelines anyway?

Bruce Alspaugh
--
To unsubscribe, go to http://mlug.missouri.edu/members/edit.php

Archives are available at http://mlug.missouri.edu/list-archives/