Re: mac and gnumeric

[Allin Cottrell <cottrell wfu edu>]

On Fri, 7 Jan 2005, Christian Neumair wrote:

> Allin Cottrell schrieb:
>
> > On Thu, 6 Jan 2005, Jody Goldberg wrote:
>
> > > - My attempts to contact Apple to get some assitance have been
> > >  basicly ignored.
> >
> >
> > Which might explain the foregoing.  Too bad.  It would be very nice to 
> > have an OS X port of gtk comparable to the Windows one.
>
> Doesn't the X11R6 subsystem of Apple and the current X11 GDK 
> implementation provide the highest possible grade of integration? 
> What would you expect from a native port?

No, I'm afraid it provides a much less than optimal grade of 
integration.  However, it does provide a minimally workable degree 
of integration, so I can understand why people might think it a low 
priority to work on a native OS X port of gtk, although in my view 
that is a mistake.

Explaining why the X11 integration is not so good, I should first 
say that my experience is limited to OS X 10.2.4 and for all I know 
things might be somewhat better in Panther, but...

* X11 programs use file (and other) dialogs that look nothing like 
native OS X controls, and are confusing to OS X users.

* X11 apps cannot be launched in the usual OS X way: complex (and 
rather fallible) gymnastics with shell scripts or Applescript are 
required.

* There are weird focus issues: in the gimp for example, each window 
has to be clicked once to get focus before any gui control will 
work: OS X users are liable to get the impression that things are 
"broken" (e.g. click on the Text tool and "nothing happens" -- well, 
what happened is that that click gave the tool selection window 
focus, but did not, yet, select the Text tool).

* Drag and drop is out of the question, yet that's a standard Mac 
mode of operation.

* X11 apps do not commandeer the command bar at the top of the Mac 
screen and make it available as OS X users expect; rather it's X11 
itself that does that, which is again confusing.  For the 
integration to be good, X11 should be entirely invisible to the 
user.

Allin Cottrell