[fpc-pascal] FPC and JAVA

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 27 Oct 2007, Jonas Maebe wrote:

> 
> On 27 Oct 2007, at 13:57, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> 
> >Lazarus looks mighty fine natively on Mac.
> 
> It may one day, but currently it is still very far from that. For example,
> pretty much every setting wubdiw has a wrong button layout. On the Mac, if you
> have a single "ok" button, it should be on the bottom right (in Lazarus they
> are in the middle). If you have an "ok" and "cancel" button, the "ok" should
> be on the right of the "cancel" button (in Lazarus, they are ordered the other
> way around). Also, all those icons in the menus look pretty weird (very few
> Mac apps have that, and none that I currently use does), and the icons in the
> toolbar look out of place compared to icons other Mac apps (mainly because of
> the limited colour palette and lack of anti-aliasing in the drawings, I
> guess).
> 
> In general, for now it still looks and feels very much like a pure Windows or
> Linux application with an Aqua skin. That may be fine for Windows/Linux users
> coming to the Mac, but it would make me click on the wrong buttons all the
> time.
> 
> I have great respect for Tombo and the others who have done a great job
> porting the LCL to Carbon, but it takes a whole lot more work than that to
> look and feel "mighty fine natively on Mac". The same will probably go for any
> Lazarus/Delphi app ported to the Mac, for that matter (unless Lazarus can do
> automatic button layouting, and if the current layout mismatch is simply due
> to some wrong default setting for the Carbon target).

While I do not dispute the validity of your comments, I'd like to point out
that any cross-platform solution will suffer from this. Be it in Mono, Java
or FPC. I'm sure the Eclipse or Mono generated programs have the same problem.

The main point is that the Mac port of Lazarus currently enables you to create 
cross-platform applications. Additionally it also enables you to create 
applications that will look OK on the Mac as well, if you were to code them 
natively on Mac, using the Mac standards. 

And as for 'looking mightlily fine', I can assure you that the Mac port was
really the unique selling position of Lazarus/FPC on Systems, last week. 
The Windows Vista-64-bit and Mac Aqua IDE running on 2 screens next to each 
other were real eye-catchers.

So some optimism and cheerfulness is definitely in order, I'd say :-)

Michael.