bzr-mac team mailing list archive

[Jean-Francois Roy <bahamut@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sep 28, 2009, at 23:39, Russel Winder wrote:

> Ian,
>
> On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 18:58 +0100, 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.
> > Additionally, bzr-explorer seems much more mature than the other
> > options we have *today*. 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 suspect that trying to impose the standard Gnome/KDE/Windows GUI  
> style
> on a Mac OS X application will fail.  The Mac OS X GUI style really
> needs to be followed by a Mac OS X GUI application.  Cross platform
> consistency of the user model is critical, but so is being consistent
> with the idiosyncratic Mac OS menu bar structure.
>
> Doesn't the mac-qt package from MacPorts download and install for  
> native
> use the Qt library?

The problem is two-fold: it is one of appearance and one of behavior.

The current UI of bzr-explorer obviously does not look native. And  
experience with Firefox and Eclipse tells us even with an astounding  
amount of work and a framework that uses native widgets, it is still  
hard to get a native look.

However, the issue of behavior is typically much harder to address. A  
Mac application is simply designed differently and behaves differently  
than a Windows application or a Linux application (and it has been my  
observation many Linux applications behave somewhat like Windows  
applications, although there are many differences as well). Things  
that are often forgotten on Windows, like drag and drop, is critical  
in a Mac app -- it is expected to work. Making use of the global menu  
bar and have a document-centric UI (with document windows) is also a  
common difference. For example, a native Bazaar client should have a  
window per-branch or per-repository that you are working with and not  
be a single window application, much like Xcode has at the very least  
one window per distinct project.

Just my 2 cents as a Mac developer and user :p

Jean-Francois