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To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Subject: Re: Lesstif (motif compatible) package. 
Cc: Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM>, terry@lambert.org,
        hackers@freefall.freebsd.org
In-reply-to: Your message of Thu, 11 Apr 1996 17:52:10 PDT
Date: Thu, 11 Apr 1996 23:03:22 -0600
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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: A good builder, of which OI's ObjectBuilder
: was one of the finest examples I've seen, lets you do far more than
: simply assign the positions of things.

thank you.

: I'm still waiting for a good one.  Xf was gross, and obviously written
: by someone unclear on the concept of how he was supposed to be making
: the programmer's job easier, not harder.  I've heard that SpecTCL is
: nicer, but I haven't gotten around to building a version of wish4.1
: with the blt_table compiled in yet, so I haven't tested it.

XF totally sucked.  I can say that because I've written a good
builder.  SpecTCL is the closest thing I've seen to something for free
that has almost as good an interface as OB.  It still gets menus wrong
by making them a special case.  They should be just drag cells, or
representations of cells onto the menu to grow it.  Pull rights should
be had by dropping a menu on a cell.  Popup dialog boxes likewise.
Everyone else seems to make these things hard because the silly
toolkit they are using makes them hard :-(.  OI made a lot of things
easy, and a few hard.  Even the hard ones needed to be papered over to
make OB usable.

Ok, enough soap boxing....

Warner