umm... which part of "cross-platform" and "use native functionality" is more important?
For the developer or for the users of the application?
As a user, there is no advantage of "looks equaly crappy on Windows, Linux, and OS X". If I use the application in my environment, it should look native.
Both. As a developer of a program which is meant to be cross platform - I need to rely on the fact that when I call a function/method/etc, that is works as advertised, without the need for #ifdef's As a user, If I am using OSX, then I want alpha blended goodness, etc.
If you have some functionality provided by one OS, while another doesn't provide it... what do you do?
You have to either emulate it, map it to similar functionality, or not provide it at all. Probably a little of each!
yep - so what would be suitable for Boost? Mathew