Date: Mon, 26 Feb 1996 12:57:11 -0700 From: Sean Kelly <kelly@yarmouth> To: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de Cc: kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de, narvi@haldjas.folklore.ee, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Win32 (was:Re: Go SCSI! Big improvement...) Message-ID: <9602261957.AA17964@emu.fsl.noaa.gov> In-Reply-To: <199602261704.SAA01438@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> (kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de)
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>>>>> "Christoph" == Christoph Kukulies <kuku@gilberto.physik.rwth-aachen.de> writes:
Christoph> Maybe I'm wrong but last time I used a text selection
Christoph> in a Tcl/Tk app it didn't behave a la
Christoph> Mac/Smalltalk/Windows - CTRLC-C, CTRL-X, CTRL-V, Auto
Christoph> replace when selected so you can type into a selection,
Christoph> selected region appears as 3D-shaded stripes instead of
Christoph> a whole block.
I think we might be suffering from a version difference problem. At
least as of tk4.0, you get whole highlighted blocks with the
obligatory 3-D borders only at the top, bottom, left, and right edges.
Christoph> Nice, maybe for someone who comes from an
Christoph> alphanumerical world and never saw other GUIs
Christoph> before. You would also declare Motif style GUI as
Christoph> sufficiently nice, do you?
Absolutely not! From user interface tests I've run, Motif extracts
the farts out of dead chickens compared with other user interface
standards. In Motif, you're supposed to have a 3-D border on
*everything* except the menu bar, which is where you need it (to
indicate that those are active sites and not just labels). It's
impossible to tell at a glance which are the selected or the
deselected buttons in a group of radio or checkbuttons. Does ``out''
indicate selected or does ``in''? The difference between radio and
checkbuttons is undersubtle. Finally, the scrollbar sucks: the user
comes to understand that repeated clicking in the trough area goes
through pages, so he happily pages along reading the material when
suddenly, clicks don't work anymore. What happened? The
elevator/thumb reached the cursor, dislodging his train of thought
from the tracks of flow.
Now, Tcl/Tk is stuck with some of these problems. But it did fix a
few of them: hilighting of active elements when the cursor enters one;
coloring of radio and checkbuttons to indicate selected items, and so
forth.
I've built many applications with OI, Motif, and Tcl/Tk. My Tcl/Tk
apps look better and run just as fast as the apps built with the other
toolkits. Best of all, user reactions are more positive.
Christoph> I doubt that Tcl/Tk would develop as the incending
Christoph> force to produce myriads of applications in a manner
Christoph> Win32 does. Spend a day with a Win32/MSVC++ programmer.
Christoph> You would want to have this under Unix.
You are correct: while I may have done quite a bit of attractive and
useful work with Tcl/Tk, the Unix realm still has a ways to go to
attract VC++ programmers into our fold. I guess it's the model of
Tcl/Tk which I like: I make compiled code to do the work of the
application, but the user interface is all script. I can change the
interface for different customers' needs without recompiling.
In the meantime, the tix toolkit looks like it might help: it's got
very good looking and useful file selector, hierarchical lists and
tables, balloon help, and so forth. We're catching up. Slowly.
Really slowly.
--
Sean Kelly
NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory, Boulder Colorado USA
If you ever go temporarily insane, don't shoot somebody, like a lot of people
do. Instead, try to get some weeding done, because you'd really be surprised.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey
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