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Re: Skins/Interface files?


From: Pete French
Subject: Re: Skins/Interface files?
Date: Sat, 09 Feb 2002 00:56:11 +0000

> Does GnuStep have some sort of interface files where the design of a 
> button etc. is saved? Is it possible to make skins and to develop a 
> 'revolutionary' interface (without harming Aqua)?

By and large it just saves the existence of 'A Button" so you can do
skins to a ertain exten. bearn in mind that if you run an OpenStep
app on OSX it ooks like a Mac application, and if you run it on Windows it
looks exactly like a Windows application - the main menu being arranged
along the top of every window open in the appliation.

The point about WYYSIWYG is well made, but the abstraction that OpenStep
provides doesnt require you to specify the actual buttons and components
in a WYSIWYG style so doing some kind of interface change is easy (remember the
old Rhapsody where you could write a default to make it look like OpenStep).
What you end up with problems is taht the locations of the components relative
to each other is in pixels so your nice nib files look odd. If you
tryy compiling your spp under Windows or OSX you see this effect quite clearly.

At York we wrote our own NIb file format which got aeway from this using
auto-layout structures ina plan-9 style way. That worked very nicely, and
enabled us to rite code that deployed on OS42 and Windows NT looking pretty
much native on each platform. I dont know if the author of thatbit of code
would be interested in opne soiurcing it, but I could ask him if ppl are
interested.

-bat.



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