Re: Mac OS X Port of GTK+

[Finlay Dobbie <finlay dobbie btinternet com>]

On Saturday, September 8, 2001, at 10:07  pm, Darin Adler wrote:

> Sounds interesting. I'm an OS X user too. I'd be willing to help you 
> finish
> once you got a big part of this done. It's a huge job, but it would 
> probably
> be fun.

Yup.

> > I am planning on using the Cocoa API, which is actually Objective-C.
>
> I think there is a C API for Quartz. What's the reason you need to use 
> the
> Cocoa API? This sounds wrong to me.

Well there is a C API, but it's evil and lowlevel, and actually private 
(Apple doesn't supply the headers). There is Carbon, of course, but I 
don't think I'm willing to learn that (it's not particularly neat), and 
I don't see any major problems with using Cocoa.

> You should definitely start with the 1.3 code, not the 1.2. There are 3
> "back ends" for GDK right now. One for X, one for Win32, and one for a 
> raw
> framebuffer. I think the Win32 port should give you lots of clues about 
> what
> you'd need to do to get everything working with Quartz. There's more 
> than
> just graphics that you'd need to deal with (clipboard and drag and 
> drop, for
> example).

Yeah, that's true.

> Note that doing this Quartz port will not change the appearance of the
> contents of GTK to match Aqua (although it will make the window borders 
> be
> real Aqua-style windows). That's something you need to be aware of at 
> the
> outset.

I was already aware of that, but thanks anyway :-)

(actually, I'd probably prefer it that way -- see the Qt port to OS X, 
which just looks ugly, along with the swing interface theme thing that 
Apple supplies -- neither of them emulate Aqua properly, and just look 
confusing IMHO... wouldn't it be possible to just create an Aqua theme 
for GTK if people really wanted it? as in bitmaps...).

 -- Finlay