Re: GTK+ on Mac OS X status

[Paul Davis <paul linuxaudiosystems com>]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Gour <gour atmarama net> wrote:

> So, how is the project of having 'native' GTK+ on going on and is it on
> par with the Qt?

most people who work with GTK don't do much work with Qt and vice
versa, so its a bit hard to answer "is it on par".

this application is written in GTK and runs on Linux, BSD, OS X and
Windows: http://ardour.org/

there are very few problems with GTK on OS X at this time. the ones
that exist are relatively minor, though for specific apps they might
be important.

> Personally, we prefer GTK+ over Qt, running GTK-based desktop (Xfce),
> but cannot (due to different reasons) to sacrifice look & behaviour of
> the application on Mac OS X platform.

native appearance is not something that is important to my application
(pro-audio apps, even the ones from Apple, don't look like "apple"
apps). support for native appearance is not particularly strong,
though there is a theme engine that will provide appearance close to
native Quartz. recent versions of GTK now support platform-centric
modifier key behaviour for modifier+key bindings that are built into
GTK (so, for example, it will use Command-foo on OS X rather than
Ctrl-foo).

there is no particularly viable way to access "native" file selection
browsing, but given the way that apple has changed the way these
dialogs work several times themselves (some versions of OS X even come
with 2 different implementations with very different appearance), i
don't see this as a huge obstacle.