On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 8:32 PM, Gottlob Frege <gottlobfrege@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Sep 7, 2010 at 5:38 PM, Alexander Lamaison <awl03@doc.ic.ac.uk> wrote:
Absolutely! I simply wouldn't touch a GUI library that didn't render native widgets. I'd be too embarrassed to release software that had an amateur look&feel.
Lots of Adobe software is written with non-native UI. Not typically described as amateur. What they have is a 'look' that tends to be somewhere between Mac and Windows, with some things possibly skinned per-paltform, but most of it with just an in between Adobe look.
As long as it looks good, it doesn't need to be native.
Note also that people are now accustomed to web sites - each has its own look and feel.
That is another thing. The Wt C++ Web Toolkit library can make a webserver with sites made in C++ in a very nice way, but it can also make standalone apps (a built-in webserver served by the Qt HTML control). Even MFC has html controls. The aspect of an html-designed GUI allows for proper flowing, wrapping, all kinds of interaction and controls and much more, assuming the HTML container is fast enough to feel responsive (such as Webkit or Mozilla's, but not IE). We need a good html-based GUI engine to make standalone programs.