[OT] Any Developers have a second...

[John Fieber]

On Aug 14, 2007, at 12:50 PM, Jason Slack wrote:

> I have a new task in front of me that I have never had to deal with.
> Recently I have used Qt, by Trolltech, CPLAT and wxWidgets as cross  
> platform
> GUI toolkits.
>
> A venture capitalist friend of mine approached me last week about  
> developing
> a new cross platform GUI toolkit exercising some HIG and other  
> principals
> that he feels are important.

You can shoot for an xplat API that yields platform native look-and- 
feel.  The gotcha is around the edges where one platform has a really  
different way of doing something than the other and you have to  
choose between substantially different behavior and encroaching  
platform specific code in the application around that, or you  
introduce something to one platform that may not really fit well.  Or  
worse, you choose one platform as the model and blindly replicate on  
the other(s).

Or you can (mostly) ignore the platform and develop your own UI  
architecture that works almost exactly the same on either side.   
Contemporary xplat Adobe applications, particularly the A/V  
applications (After Effects, Premiere Pro, Soundbooth, etc.) and  
Lightroom, are pretty good examples of this.   They drop into  
platform native UI for the more mundane dialog boxes, but the core UI  
you interact with 98% of the time is an almost identical experience  
regardless of the platform.

And the gap between the HIG and what Apple does with their own  
applications leaves a lot of latitude for interpretation, and no  
matter how good the toolkit is, some folks will still produce  
applications with a horrible user experience, and the HIG is no  
substitute for understanding how actual users interact with your  
program.

-john