[Lazarus] GTK 3.0

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 2016-07-13 20:27, Dmitry Boyarintsev wrote:
> So what's more important - to be consistent and act 100% exactly the same
> across platform
> - or feel more towards the native platform?

That as always been the big difference [design goal] between LCL and
[pure] fpGUI.

LCL believes “native” is better, but sacrifices consistency between LCL
widgetsets - often leading to IFDEF’d code in LCL and in your
application. It’s been like that 10 years ago when I first started using
Lazarus, and is still the case today.

fpGUI believes "consistency" is better - producing cleaner code with no
IFDEF's at all. In commercial environments it also makes cross-platform
training much easier, and Windows and Linux systems can run side-by-side
with no visual difference or behaviour using the same application.

With that, my argument [for the fpGUI design] is also that people use
the web as a new platform. There is NO “native look and feel” for the
web, yet nobody has any problems using web apps (Gmail, Office 365 and
the millions of others). So why can people use the web (with no native
L&F) just fine, but suddenly can’t manage with similar desktop
applications. End-users are not as helpless (stupid or incompetent) as
many claim. As long as a button acts like a button, a menu acts like a
menu etc, end-users can use them just fine. fpGUI also has excellent
theming support to simulate native L&F to acceptable standards. It
includes about 8 themes
[http://geldenhuys.co.uk/~graemeg/themes/start.html], and creating new
ones are a very quick and easy process.

On a side note:
  There is NO “native” widget toolkit under Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris
  etc - XLib doesn’t supply a GUI toolkit. So native has no bearing
  on such platforms.

I can also throw in the argument that not even Microsoft or Apple adhere
to their own Human Interface Guidelines - so why must we be that strict?

Pros or Cons, I still think having a fully implemented LCL-fpGUI
widgetset would be very beneficial to the Lazarus project.

Regards,
  Graeme

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp