Re: Impelmenting NSWindows95InterfaceStyle

[Nicolas Roard]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 5:01 AM, Robert J. Slover
<robert.j.slover@verizon.net> wrote:
>
> On Jan 19, 2009, at 20:08, Gregory John Casamento <greg_casamento@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> Robert,
>
> I agree that this is a conundrum. :)   We are facing the same decision that
> had to be made for OpenStep on Windows.
>
> I really believe that we should choose an approach similar to the one that
> NeXT took at that point.  I would be very skeptical of an MDI based
> approach, but I might be open to providing it as an option, if someone can
> show me that it's a viable approach for GNUstep apps.
>
> What concerns me about MDI are the modifications that would be necessary in
> the backend to support it... as well as possible impacts on the API to
> accommodate the concepts having subwindows (which MDI uses) would
> introduce.
>
>
> I didn't say I liked the idea of MDI, just that it would be what I would
> expect to see in a Windows app in this situation. :-)
> I believe there's a very good reason for that... Windows originally needed
> to "embrace and extend" a bucketload of applications ported over from other
> environments where the menu-per-window nonsense didn't exist and didn't make
> sense. These would be applications from DOS, Macintosh (including what would
> become Office and Works), etc. More importantly, the users needed to follow
> and Windows needed to provide for their habits --many DOS applications had
> built-in "window" management via menu accelerators, or the Borland-style
> top-of-screen horizontal menu across all of the windows when you hit F10,
> etc. Not to mention Mac apps had a single, shared application menu and (at
> the time) application-centric window focus policy. If you were Aldus getting
> ready to port PageMaker and FreeHand from the Mac, MDI would easily have
> deferred a complete GUI re-think, as well as a total rewrite of
> documentation and training materials.  So, MDI let foreign menu and window
> policies be safely shoe-horned into Windows. It is the same problem, and
> therefore what I would expect to see on Windows in this case.

This might have been true, but MDI is a forgotten thing (at least I
hope!) in Windows.
I would hate for GNUstep apps to suddenly be MDI (!). Frankly, either
the application has a main window and we can shoehorn a menu, or not.
I expect that if you want your application to run on Windows you can
take a couple of hours reviewing your UI... and most applications will
already have a main window...
Also, as david pointed, this work on NSWindows95InterfaceStyle should
be helpful as well for GNUstep apps running under KDE and GNOME.

-- 
Nicolas Roard