Is Gnome becoming a Microsoft project?

[Veeti Paananen]

On 07/20/2012 11:00 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> Back to Vuze, that figure is less than 8% of available RAM on a 2GB
> system and 16% of RAM on a 1GB RAM system. Also, Vuze is much more
> than a simple Bittorrent client, it provides embedded playback, cd
> burning, etc. Comparing it with uTorrent is like comparing SeaMonkey
> suite to Chromium...

Like I said, it adds up surprisingly quickly.

> SECOND PART, toolkits...
> 
> Swing provides native look and feel on Windows, GTK, and OSX. Not all
> Java apps use it, like not all C++ desktop apps use QT or GTK... you
> need to call setNativeLookAndFeel
> 
> http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/javase/6_desktop_features/
> 
> here two screenshots of muCommander on Windows XP, Fedora 17 and Win7
> for your visual comparison
> 
> 1. MuCommander on WinXP with native LookAndFeel
> http://img812.imageshack.us/img812/6668/java6swingwinxpnativelo.jpg
> 
> 2. MuCommander on Fedora 17 with native (GTK) LookAndFeel
> http://img717.imageshack.us/img717/3637/javamucommanderf17.png

I am well aware of the "native" look and feel in Swing. It may look nice
when you first start a Swing application, but the paint starts chipping
away the second you actually start using the UI.

Just as one example out of countless cases, Swing menus in Windows XP
look very off: they are completely flat and are missing the drop shadow
that native UI's present. The same applies to dropdown boxes, etc.

That may sound incredibly pedantic and petty to complain about, but
these sort of seemingly small inconsistencies and problems pile up to
build a really visually displeasing UI. And that's not all: they can
also pose real usability issues.

A good example of this is the file tree in IntelliJ IDEA, a Java IDE
that I have the pleasure of using on a daily basis. Whenever I
right-click a file for more options, the underlying filename doesn't get
highlighted with a blue background like you would expect it to: this
always leaves me wondering if I selected the right item or not.

(Make an enlightened guess about the toolkit IDEA is using.)

This applies to many other toolkits like GTK+ too. GTK+ is fine for
GNOME-based environments but it sort of sucks elsewhere. If I see that
damn file picker in Windows once more...

On the other hand, Qt is a toolkit that I wish would receive much more
adoption. It makes an almost flawless (if not completely flawless)
effort to fit in to the platform it's running on. It takes all kinds of
things that other toolkits don't into account: paddings, button orders,
native dialogs and so much more. A Qt app looks and feels native in both
KDE and GNOME.

-- 
Veeti P. - I probably had better things to do than write this