bzr-mac team mailing list archive

[Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ian wrote:
> Jean-Francois Roy made an interesting comment regarding native app GUI
> support for Bazaar. While I agree native options are important, I
> still feel that getting a cross-platform solution working would also
> be very beneficial for numerous people who work in mixed environments.

Right. I don't want to discourage anyone from building a great native OS
X app and the Objective-C API to Bazaar recently hatched sounds an
important step forward. It's no small undertaking though.

Technically, I understand several high profile apps have been developed
in Qt and ported to the Mac including Photoshop Elements, Goggle Earth
and Skype. Qt does allow calls to native OS X toolkits so I feel we
ought to push the boundaries of that before assuming that we'll never
make Explorer feel native enough for Mac users.

> Additionally, bzr-explorer seems much more mature than the other
> options we have *today*.

I'm sure we can still do quite a lot to improve Explorer on OS X though.
For example, I want to replace the current tab-based navigation with a
navigation "source list" on the LHS, ala Finder and iTunes. (That UI
will work better on all platforms, not just OS X.) It would be a good
test case as well for seeing how "native" we could make that control.
The navigator can be a plain tree on other platforms but it ought to
look and behave like a true source list control on OS X.

> Yet, unless you are willing to go through the
> compilation issues of hand building pyQT then an OS X user will not be
> able to use such a cross-platform UI. There is a bug on this, but no
> package with the dependencies needed for bazaar-explorer have been
> made, and this seems a great shame.
> 
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bzr/+bug/349130
> 
> Has anyone had experience of building pyQT, and how could it be
> integrated into an installer for Leopard and Snow Leopard users?

I believe Guillermo is working on a "desktop" installer to complement
the "core" installer. The desktop installer will include all the stuff
in the core installer together with documentation, QBzr and Explorer I hope.

BTW, does anyone here have experience producing "native" help on OS X?
I'd like to offer that instead of PDFs but I have no idea how to create it.

Ian C.