[Pythonmac-SIG] Objective C and Cocoa

[Martina Oefelein]

Hi Kevin,

> The main reason I'm so keen on wxWindows is that other toolkits 
> commonly have the problem that they were *written* specifically for 
> one platform, then ported to another. (Often using 'themes' to mimic 
> look - ugh.) Portability wasn't necessarily an initial goal, but 
> people started saying "Oh, can I run this on platform Y too?". Thus 
> even though they run on other platforms, there are a lot of internal 
> assumptions in the code which make it not really portable. *nix apps 
> tend to follow Windows conventions to some extent so the change isn't 
> so dramatic, but when porting a *nix toolkit to Mac or vice versa, it 
> is bound to at least feel strange on the other platform. wxWindows is 
> by far the closest thing I know of to something that "does the right 
> thing".

well, I must admit I haven't tried to use it yet, but the terminology 
and documentation I browsed so far feels rather Windows-ish. For 
example, "window" is encompassing controls and views as well as "real" 
windows (which are called "frames" in wxWindows). Other examples are 
SDI/MDI, per-window (pardon, per-frame) menus, right moues button, key 
names etc. That gives me (still) the impression of a "ported" toolkit 
and lets me wonder whether it would be possible to develop wxWindows 
apps using the Mac as main development platform.

Thus I believe one would often have to think "backwards" to realize a 
particular feature - translating from Mac into (wx)Windows concepts and 
terminology, and hoping that wxWindows will translate this into the 
desired Mac look & behaviour.

ciao
Martina