Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Fri 13th Jul 2007 06:18 UTC, submitted by Sander Jansen
Jeroen van der Zijp, the author of Fox Toolkit, has kindly given kerkythea.net
an interview. The Fox Toolkit is a platform independent GUI that has matured over the last years to become one of the fastest and well structured APIs.
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Member since:
2005-11-20
To me the disadvantage of non-native controls is that they usually don't fit with the rest of the environment. No matter how much you try to imitate the look and feel of the platform you're doomed to fail, because new version of the platform can be advanced somehow (themes, spell checking, IME or other such feature) and your custom controls won't reflect that.
While there is a lot of truth in your statement, I do not see it as critical. Note that even MS is using non-native widgets in almost any application (e.g. MS Office) and nobody really complains.
Theming APIs are now good enough to integrate non-native widgets in a way that you will not notice uless you are looking very carefuly (e.g. like GUI Toolkit author trying to do this right :-).
Qt, U++, OpenOffice, Firefox all are using this approach and I have not noticed people complaining about e.g. Firefox appearance in Win32 or Linux...
Edited 2007-07-13 15:59