[Lazarus] Color setup of the Form1: TForm1

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

2008/6/21 Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho <felipemonteiro.carvalho at gmail.com>:
> Honestly I think that Windows Media Player and MS Office look crap,
> and their wierd looks just confuse me and make their use problematic.

I agree on both counts. :)  Though it was just an example, not what
I'm striving for. ;)

> But there do is a point here. If Microsoft openly ignores all their
> GUI guidelines, why should we follow them?

Go figure that! Breaking there own rules. I wonder if those products
ever received Windows certification. :)

> But not everything is Windows. When you go to Mac OS X you will see
> that you will sudenly need native menus, immitating the native look
> will get much harder, and custormers will actually pay attention to
> it.

Mac's are probably the most difficult of all. From what I have read,
the users have a very high standard to what applications must look
like. Apple also seems to adhere to it's own GUI guidelines as the
apps I've seen all look and behave similar.

I never said imitating a native look is going to be easy, but it is
possible (Qt is again a case in point). Mac is probably the worst
example I can use, but as far as I know Pixel 32 (image editor) fakes
all it's native looks as well, and although not 100% accurate (even
the WinXP look), the users seems happy enough.


> Further, there is one advantage of native gui: accessibility. The user
> changes it's Windows settings and all software adjusts to it, colors
> change, fonts get bigger, etc. Does fpgui respect that?

Relatively easy to accomplish. I've already done some trials with
fpGUI under Windows. Detecting when system fonts or colours change and
adapts to that. I know accessibility is not only fonts and colour, but
each OS seems to send out some signals or messages when something
important changed so other applications can detect it. fpGUI's corelib
could easily hook into those events as well.

Anyway, I know at the time Lazarus was started, there was no working
fpGUI and at that point the core Lazarus developers decided native
widgets was the way to go. I'm not saying Lazarus should change now,
it will be a huge task. The original Lazarus design goal and my
current design goals are different - I have no problem with that.
Plus I have no intension or interest in creating yet another IDE.
Lazarus with fpGUI suites my needs well. Also like you said, LCL seems
flexible enough so eventually fpGUI could be integrated with LCL which
should solve a few problems and overcome some limitations of the other
widget sets.

In the mean time, I just continue improving fpGUI.  ;-)

Regards,
 - Graeme -


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