bzr-mac team mailing list archive

[Ian Clatworthy <ian.clatworthy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jean-Francois Roy wrote:

> 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.

My understanding is that Firefox is GTK based and GTK on OS X isn't
anywhere near as good as Qt on OS X? Eclipse is, well, Eclipse. It's UI
is lousy on Ubuntu as well.

> 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).

Right. And believe it or not, I took the time to read/browse the OS X
design guidelines before I wrote a line of Explorer code. My thinking
was that OS X had the strictest guidelines and therefore I needed to
design Explorer to met them first and foremost.

> 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.

Right again. To put explorer's design evolution so far in perspective,
the immediate focus was functional scope, i.e. exposing what dialogs
QBzr was missing. I'm been dreaming of before things along the lines
above but it would have been sugar coating on a pretty but unproductive
app to add them before getting basic functionality in place. That will
obviously change once the remaining essential bits (e.g. rename) are in
place and 1.0 ships.

Ian C.