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From: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: GUI Portability: Say MOTIF
Message-ID: <1261@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 29 Sep 89 22:07:59 GMT
References: <434@maytag.waterloo.edu> <2927@ur-cc.UUCP> <8105@ardent.UUCP> <2982@ur-cc.UUCP> <13724@grebyn.com> <3014@ur-cc.UUCP> <1256@quintus.UUCP> <4187@sugar.hackercorp.com> <20034@usc.edu>
Reply-To: pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 40

In article <20034@usc.edu> papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) writes:
>>In article <1256@quintus.UUCP> pds@quintus.UUCP (Peter Schachte) writes:
>>>But I don't think you want a Motif programmer interface.  The Amiga's
>>>libraries are lean, clean, and fast.  The X toolkit, on which Motif is
>>>built, is not.

>How do you know? Have you tried it?

Yes.  I was careful to specify Xtk, and not Motif, in my criticism.  I
don't know much about Motif, but I worked closely with Xtk long enough
to recognize a kludge.  It is extremely complicated, and huge.  For
example, xclock, by no means a full-featured clock program, is 278528
bytes compiled for a sun3.  Programming with Xtk is not particularly
easy, and writing widgets is downright painful (I haven't done it, but
I've looked at the code for a few "simple" widgets).

As for performance, what hardware are you using?  Xtk takes the rather
bizzare step of making each widget its own window.  This means when you
create a dialog with 10 buttons in it, you are creating at least 11
windows.  Yes, I know Motif has what it calls gadgets, which don't have
associated windows, but I understand they are not "mouseable," so can't
be used for buttons.

>I wish I had something like the
>X Toolkit and a "uniform" user interface on the Amiga so that I would not
>have to learn a new interface for every Amiga program I use.

It would be nice to have a "standard" interface sometimes, though it
does tend to preclude innovation in interfaces.  When did you last see a
pie menu on a Mac?

A more interesting question to me is portability.  I'd like to be able
to write applications that run on my Amiga at home and my Sun at work.
But I don't think Motif is a good way to achieve that, for all the
reasons I've mentioned, and some I haven't.

-- 
-Peter Schachte
pds@quintus.uucp
...!sun!quintus!pds