[OT] Any Developers have a second...

[Lothar Scholz]

Hello Jason,

Wednesday, August 15, 2007, 2:50:29 AM, you wrote:

JS> A venture capitalist friend of mine approached me last week about developing
JS> a new cross platform GUI toolkit exercising some HIG and other principals
JS> that he feels are important.

Something that i wanted to do for a long time :-)

JS> I have never developed a cross-platform GUI toolkit and am sort of stumped a
JS> bit on the implementation details.

Well there is one point where all the existing toolkits suffer at the
moment: No toolkit was designed with all three platforms in mind. So
they don't work too well with Apple Systems. So look carefully at
Windows and the X11 toolkits.

Look carefully at TCL/TK. The event handling is still unreached, the
Text and Canvas widgets are a good start but need to be hugely
improved. They were state of the art for such a long time (i only miss
the model<->view separation). Also look for layout managers. IMHO
Cocoa sucks for it explicit positioning - well maybe you need this for
a design computer but it makes everything much much harder (I18n oder
customized font sizes).

If you implement the widgets, take the way in the middle because both
other ways have shown that they are very far from perfect. Use simple
widgets from the native widget set, but write more complex widgets in a
cross plattform way. This will handle the most calls.

Make sure you can integrate 3rd Party native controls like the
webbrowser (for example IExplorer or GTK/KDE widgets) easily. This is
what IMHO sucks most at the moment.

And try to write a Custom Control Widget Library that is cross toolkit
useable so that some 3rd Party widget vendors can use it to write
sellable YourToolkit/MFC/QT/Delphi/Cocoa/RealBasic Widgets. With this
you will a very strategy point.

And come back with an offer if you are looking for an oversea employee :-)
Love to burn venture capital.

-- 
Best regards,
 Lothar                            mailto:llothar at web.de