[fpc-devel] fpdoc HTML with search feature

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 19/08/07, Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe at elis.ugent.be> wrote:
>
> I think that in general, this means you simply should not do that, as
> it will make your program look out of place and not fit in the other
> apps and the rest of the OS. It will probably make your program
> harder to use rather than easier, because it doesn't look like people
> expect it to look.

Micha got it correct on both counts. We were talking about bugs in OS
shipped DLL's. If the widget set is based on those GUI dll's, the
widget set has to live with them (bugs). My issue was that there could
be a bug in the Treeview component of Windows, but not in GTK. If it
wasn't detected by the LCL developers, if could be annoying for users
(or application developers).

As for the look and feel compared to the OS look and feel.  I think
that is over exaggerated by *way to many* people and is not that
important at all.  As Micha stated, lets take MS Office as an example.
Word, Excel and Outlook does NOT adhere to the normal OS GUI
components and style. Yet every body (as in millions of users) are
just fine with using Office that looks different compared to any other
Windows based app.  Now what about the most popular media players -
WinAmp and Windows Media Player. Again they do not adhere to the
normal GUI look, yet is the most popular players around.  The list
goes on, but you get the point.

As for fpGUI's look and feel. Currently we are basing the look on
Windows 2000 (or Win XP classic). The users color scheme will be
detected and used as well (on all OS's).  Other themes will also be
built into fpGUI in due time. Themes like a native XP Luna or Silver
look or ClearLook under GTK2, BlueCurve and Motif (just like Qt did).
Image based themes will follow later which will give a unlimited
amount of looks (like WinAmp does).

My employer already stated that they want a different look to standard
Windows apps when we deploy to our 200+ centres, so that the
application can stand out a bit. Just the look though, not how the
components (application) works.

Regards,
  - Graeme -