bzr-mac team mailing list archive

[John Arbash Meinel <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Ian Clatworthy wrote:
> 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.
> 

So I think the main counterpoint is the 'bzr-exclipse' versus
'qbzr-eclipse' debate.

Namely, the former is meant as a 'native' plugin, and the latter is a
wrapper around the 'qbzr' dialogs.

At *this* point, the latter has more polish and is more functional,
though it doesn't integrate quite as well. And the main reason for that
is that you get *lots* of development from the qbzr guys if you layer on
top of them. Versus having to implement everything from scratch.

I honestly think that long-term having a OS specific GUI for Mac is a
great idea. I don't think anyone writing that will be able to
reimplement all of qannotate, qlog, qbrowse, etc, in a reasonable amount
of time versus leveraging all the work that is already out there.

It is possible that it is just a 'glue' that is needed, plus a bit of
work to refactor the dialogs to be glued together more cleanly for Mac.
(A dialog may be making assumptions about its menu that should be
changed, etc.)

Anyway, I'm happy to support people who want to make BazaarX, etc
better. I think that with limited resources, focusing on getting Bazaar
Explorer to be better on Mac is a better use of time.

For *me*, I switched to using Firefox & Thunderbird precisely because
when I switch from Windows to Mac to Linux it still works and looks like
what I'm used to. And having consistency *across* OS's was far better
than having consistency *with* the OS. I fully understand the other
side, though, where you are immersed in a single OS and what local apps
to all work together.

John
=:->
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