Re: GNUstep on MS Windows

[Jeff Teunissen]

Jason Clouse wrote:

> On 2003-12-07 09:34:40 +0000 Richard Frith-Macdonald
> <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
> > I don't think it's worth getting into the technical details which
> > make it obvious ... that would be a long discussions and probably
> > unconvincing to people who haven't looked at and digested the workings
> > of the gui code, so it's ok to ask people to just accept our word that
> > the gui library cannot reasonably be expected to work with native
> > widgets, but that it can reasonably be modified to support an
> > interface style which looks like native widgets.
> 
> Isn't that what we wanted anyway?  I just don't think it's reasonable
> to accept applications that don't blend in with the surrounding
> environment.  But who cares how it's done?  The only part that I think
> needs to be dynamic is the rearrangement of menu items, and the
> replacement of NeXT-ish standard dialog windows with Win32
> equivalents.

Rearrangement of menu items is wrong, full-stop.

If you are designing a UI for Windows then you build a different menu
system, with different accelerator keys, different names, and so on. You
can't just transplant the "GNUstep on Unix" menu system onto it and expect
it to be useful to a "native" user.

The command to quit the program is not "Quit", it's "Exit", and the
accelerator is not "q", it's "Alt+X". In addition, on Windows you have to
use and support mnemonic names, like "E~x~it", so that the "x" glyph is
drawn underlined and the keystrokes "Alt+F x" will execute that command,
exiting the program.

You don't automatically move top-level menu commands to the File menu, you
place different menu commands onto different menus, and some of them do not
exist at all -- like "Hide", which is nonsensical on Windows and should
never be present (and perhaps not even work).

-- 
| Jeff Teunissen  -=-  Pres., Dusk To Dawn Computing  -=-  deek @ d2dc.net
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