On Mon, 2006-02-13 at 18:55 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
Indeed it would, but I fear that in opting for a cross platform toolkit like Gtk2Hs it will be impossible to add the final layer of polish and system integration that will change this from being useful to being a killer application. For example, linking with Gtk2Hs and GHC makes the binary 8Mb for hello world
Not true! At least not true any more. :-) I added support for GHC's "split-objs" feature to the Gtk2Hs build system and the size of a striped hello world GUI shrank from 2.7M to 250k. For reference a trivial program (main = print "hello world") is 190k on my system. This improvement will be included in the next release.
- the entire program so far is under 100Kb so that puts it in a whole different ballpark. Also things like drag and drop of files under Gtk2Hs don't work, and the toolbar would not be native, and therefore less pretty :)
Hmm. Drag 'n drop. Yeah we'll have to look into that. I believe it is supposed to work but we've not made those features available yet. You'll have to prod us or even better - send us a patch! ;-) The toolbar should be indistinguishable from a 'native' one because it uses the native WinXP theme API to do the drawing. Though I notice that when using the 'clasic' windows theme that it does indeed look a little different. Someone should file a bug against Gtk+'s windows theme.
Of course, I am attempting to keep the cross platform bits and the user interaction bits separate, so hopefully it will be possible to have native ports of the system, but thats a way off yet. Someone has expressed interest in porting it to Mac.
Yeah, Gtk+ is still a bit ugly on Mac. There is a company working on that however so I hope it'll be better in future: http://developer.imendio.com/wiki/Gtk_Mac_OS_X They're starting by getting Gtk+ to work without X11 and then getting the native theme right. This will probably take many months however. Duncan