Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ginosko!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!apple!sun-barr!newstop!sun!quintus!pds 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