[Lazarus] Color setup of the Form1: TForm1

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

2008/6/20 Mattias Gaertner <nc-gaertnma at netcologne.de>:
> But:
> - is it VCL compatible?

fpGUI was not designed be VCL compatible, but it is close in some
place. I don't mean for Lazarus to use fpGUI. I meant if the Lazarus
developers used a custom written toolkit from the beginning it could
very easily been designed to be VCL compatible.

> - What about file dialogs, icons, clipboard, sub pixel rendering,
> unicode support, accessibility features, all that stuff that

dialogs - done
clipboard - 80% done
sub pixel rending - done where needed, but not optimized for speed yet.
unicode support - done, it uses UTF8 for all text and supports locale
dependant file system access.

> gtk/qt/carbon has already implemented and more important: is
> maintaining?

The initial code was the hard part, but maintaining and improving is
much easier. Lazarus is not immune to maintenance. LCL needs to be
maintained as well because GTK2, Qt, Cocoa and Win32 continuesly
evolves. LCL plays catch-up way more than fpGUI ever will.

> Does that mean fpgui's theme engine is finally good enough to create
> native looking apps?

The implementation is not 100% complete yet, but most of the design
work is done. I already did some performance tests. If the theme is
complex with many 50+ components, performance starts degrading, but
that's purely down to one function Canvas.StretchDraw that hasn't been
optimized yet. I'm also busy working on improving the amount of
refreshes required.

> linux, BSD and OS X. Apparently people don't like the same look&feel.
> They like a native look so much, that they spent quite a lot of time
> into specializing instead of working on the base set.

Like I said, it's fairly easy to fool 90% of the people out there and
many high profile applications like MS Office, Windows Media Player
don't adhere to the OS look & feel and nobody complains about them! A
custom toolkit can be design to fake the native look depending on
which platform it runs under. Qt is a case in point.


Regards,
 - Graeme -


_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/