wxAmiga

[bhoggett]

All right. Let's do this a bit differently.  :-P

1) What am I talking about?

2) Discuss.


(clue: substitute "Amiga" in the topic line with something else, depending on which "Amiga" branch you're most interested in)

Oh, and we're talking software development, in case anyone's really lost.

 :-D  :-D  :-D

[bhoggett]

Hmmm, I wonder of I'd have got more replies if I'd just posted

 :destroy:

or

 :flame:

or :whack:  :smack:  :quickdraw:

Seems asking folks to engage the grey matter makes 'em run a mile  :roll:

[bhoggett]

@RichardV5

my guess is you taking about a Amiga port of wxWindows.

http://www.wxWindows.org

Heh. I thought that would bring a response. :-P

Yes, I am talking about wxWindows and what it would mean if the API was ported to AmigaOS/MorphOS/AROS.

The interesting thing about it is that wxWindows has already been implemented to sit on other GUI toolkits like GTK+ or Motif, so might it be interesting to see wxMUI or wxReAction for example?

Why? Portability. Bindings to many programming languages. Maturity. Ability to be combined with SDL for nice GUIs to multimedia applications.

As long as any "outside" application needs to be transplanted to "Amiga" native GUIs to be ported the various Amiga branches will always struggle to play catch-up.

Rather than spend money or resources porting individual applications, wouldn't Genesi and Hyperion be better advised in helping develop some of the platform-independent toolkits to enable ports to be done with minimal effort in the future?

[bhoggett]

@csirac_

I think the main problem is that Amiga developers/users see wxWindows and go "aaargh! NOT Windows. We don't want Windows on our Amigas" and no one takes a closer look. There is also an elitist tendency, where Amigans want good applications from the outside world ported to the Amiga, but aren't bothered about making life easier for Amiga developers by giving them the option to easily port their applications to other platforms.

It's an insular view and very widespread. You can see this by the almost total lack of reaction this sort of subject gets when it is brought up.

@AmigaSource

Welcome back.

[bhoggett]

@xeron

I'll bet it never happens.

You're probably right, more's the pity. Certainly those losing out will be the Amiga community.

ReAction and MUI might be nice enough, but both are proprietary and essentially support only one OS (despite some crossover with legacy ClassAct and MUI support). Programmers looking at adding the Amigas to their supported platforms see that they must learn new APIs which will be of no use to them elsewhere and this increases the cost and effort of supporting the platform.

I can't help looking at the Amiga platforms and thinking how developer-unfriendly they are. Restrcited available APIs, poor development tools, almost non-existent documentation and literature, really sad range of tutorials, most of which are severely outdated, very small number of languages supported at up-to-date versions.

[bhoggett]

@Kronos

Finally managed to have a fast look at the sources

insert general rant against the evils of  the wxwindows-site
sourceforge, rpm and the linux-dir-structure (what structure ?)

Ähm ...feeling better ;-)

You don't have to download the rpms if all you want is the sources.  :-P

a) don't like the look (o.k.can probraly be changed).

It can sit on the native widget sets or toolkits. On Linux you can have wxX11 (which looks very plain), wxGTK (looks a bit dated now), wxGTK2 (much nicer, and totally configurable as you can configure GTK2's look). wxMSW looks like Windows. wxMUI would look like MUI and wxReaction would look like ReAction. See?

b) it's source is counting in MB ....

So?

c) I do remember all to well the mess that I saw in the OO.org or GTK sources when I had a closer look at that :-x

No one suggested it would be easy.  I merely said it would be worth it.

Sure, it would be nice to have it, but wasting 2 or 3 good developers(*) just to get yet more ports

No, you don't get it. The incoming ports would be nice, sure, but the main benefit would be in giving non-Amiga developers a reason to support the Amiga(*) and giving Amiga developers a chance to get their work to a wider audience.

(*) Those that can cope with big projects, which are few and far between in Amiga-land, and which are more or less all allready involved in one "big" project .....

Probably true, but that doesn't mean that they are all involved in a good development strategy. Not everyone is looking at the bigger picture or taking the long term future into account.

(*) I'm using "Amiga" in the generic sense rather than the trademarked one.