Re: Look and Feel

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 19 Feb 2005, at 08:29, Jason Clouse wrote:

> On 2005-02-19 01:20:13 -0500 Richard Frith-Macdonald 
> <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > The conservative camp:
> > The NeXT style interface is one of the best looking ones ever 
> > produced, it looks fresh and distinctive, but could be 
> > tweaked/modified as there is always room for improvement... if 
> > someone can produce an even better theme, let's use it.
>
> Well, I'd describe it more as "do whatever you want so long as it 
> isn't in core."

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'd happily see a good theme engine 
contributed to the core distribution.

Indeed, I believe it makes sense to have a degree of theme support 
built in to the standard gui classes rather than requiring a theme 
engine to be entirely separate ... but extremely 
clean/clear/simple/maintainable code is essential there, as keeping the 
gui reliable/bugfree/fast/compatible is high priority.

That being said, if I was writing a theme engine, I'd do it entirely 
separately to start with ... and only when it was stable would I start 
to gradually merge features into the gui code where it helps 
performance and avoids code duplication.  The -poseAs: feature of ObjC 
is great here.