LuCiFeR[SD] wrote:I cannot see why EC's custom GUI system would not improve with constructive criticism, rather than a generalised blanket statement of all custom GUI's are crap.
But they are. Not because they are worse than native toolkits, but because they aren't native toolkits. Even if a custom toolkit is 639582 times better than a native toolkit, it's still crap because it
isn't native. Why should it be native?
1. Give a uniform look
and behavior to all programs.
2. Global preferences are there for a reason: they should be followed, or there's no reason to have them. And the global preferences includes fonts, colours and shapes of the widgets, even some behaviour.
3. Accessibility: Do you think custom toolkits works screen readers? Nope.
Edit: Sorry to spoil the fun, but I really mean do mean it.
Even if they're done in a better way than native, they should be thrown out of the window immediately, with absolutely no exceptions.
Edit again: GTk it neither native nor does it pass the "low suckiness factor" test. It's slow (
seems slower than EC, kudos to the EC author), it's got a clumsy API (treeview uses a model-view-controller approach, but to get fine control over the view it's actually necessary to change the data stored in the model, which defeats the whole purpose; it uses strings for callback names (!!!); it works with no less than 3 image formats in memory, GdkPixbuf, GdkPixmap, GtkPixmap, and the conversion routines are one-way (!); GTk and friends has lots of deprecated functions, some of which are necessary to most easily use non-deprecated functions, etc, etc...), it lacks automatic accellerator keys for menus, and a lot of keyboard navigation stuff isn't sane.
