Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
Downloadable applications are a little hard to come by. I know of Regexp
Coach, which incidentally is not available for OS X, and that's pretty much
it.
I'd like to know
1. How native the look and feel is on Windows and OS X.
2. How much platform-dependent tweaking is necessary.
Thanks
alex goldman <·····@spamm.er> writes:
> Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
> Downloadable applications are a little hard to come by. I know of Regexp
> Coach, which incidentally is not available for OS X, and that's pretty much
> it.
>
> I'd like to know
>
> 1. How native the look and feel is on Windows and OS X.
>
> 2. How much platform-dependent tweaking is necessary.
>
> Thanks
Don't know about OSX, but local windowing controls are used in the Linux
and Windows ports so look & feel is reasonably conformant.
I didn't need any platform tweaking for drawing and fonts. Onscreen
font and line sizes do seem to vary however I strongly suspect I wasn't
expressing them abstractly or handling scaling properly so onscreen size
variations between the 2 platforms is unsuprising.
Overall I'm really happy with CAPI for cross-platform use. Having used
MFC and Visual Basic for gui development, the CAPI architecture is
wonderful in comparison. Once you get used to them, the layout tools
will save you a huge amount of hassle.
Gregm
alex goldman wrote:
> Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
> Downloadable applications are a little hard to come by. I know of Regexp
> Coach, which incidentally is not available for OS X, and that's pretty much
> it.
The LispWorks IDE itself is implemented with CAPI, so you get a good
impresssion by downloading them (the personal editions).
> I'd like to know
>
> 1. How native the look and feel is on Windows and OS X.
I don't know about Windows. In OS X, you can easily tell that it's not a
"native" OS X applications, lots of little and not so little details
don't work as expected. However, I think they did a pretty decent job,
and they have announced major improvements in that regard for the next
release, which is supposed to be available sometime next year IIRC.
> 2. How much platform-dependent tweaking is necessary.
I have no idea.
Pascal
--
2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop
July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005
http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Pascal Costanza wrote:
>
> I don't know about Windows. In OS X, you can easily tell that it's not a
> "native" OS X applications, lots of little and not so little details
> don't work as expected.
Keyboard shortcuts and things like spell checker and clipboard?
alex goldman wrote:
> Pascal Costanza wrote:
>
>
>>I don't know about Windows. In OS X, you can easily tell that it's not a
>>"native" OS X applications, lots of little and not so little details
>>don't work as expected.
>
>
> Keyboard shortcuts and things like spell checker and clipboard?
Don't know about the spell checker, but keyboard shortcuts and clipboard
work fine. For example, it's also possible to add keyboard shortcuts for
menu entries from Apple's system preferences - in this way, I have
mapped F8 to HyperSpec lookup, which is very handy. I can also very
easily copy&paste across applications.
On Mac OSX, keyboard shortcuts within the IDE work especially well
because the Apple shortcuts (invoked via the Command key) don't
interfere with the Emacs keybindings (invoked via the Ctrl and Alt keys).
Pascal
--
2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop
July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005
http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Pascal Costanza wrote:
> alex goldman wrote:
>> Pascal Costanza wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I don't know about Windows. In OS X, you can easily tell that it's not a
>>>"native" OS X applications, lots of little and not so little details
>>>don't work as expected.
>>
>>
>> Keyboard shortcuts and things like spell checker and clipboard?
>
> Don't know about the spell checker, but keyboard shortcuts and clipboard
> work fine.
What doesn't work as expected then?
alex goldman wrote:
>>>Pascal Costanza wrote:
>>>
>>>>I don't know about Windows. In OS X, you can easily tell that it's not a
>>>>"native" OS X applications, lots of little and not so little details
>>>>don't work as expected.
> What doesn't work as expected then?
The layout of windows is strange. For example, the borders take up too
much space. The icons in the windows don't look like they typically look
in other Mac apps. The riders that allow you to switch between different
window contents don't look like what I have seen in other applications.
The free-floating icon bar is strange, and especially the modal dialog
boxes that seem to be connected to single windows are very untypical.
There are probably also some minor details, but I am far from being an
expert in GUI design, so I can only give you a vague report purely from
a user's perspective, but not the details.
Overall, I don't think these deviations are serious, though. For
platform-independent development, LispWorks seems to be a pretty decent
choice (again, from a user's perspective).
Pascal
--
2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop
July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005
http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Hi Pascal,
Pascal Costanza wrote:
> I don't know about Windows. In OS X, you can easily tell that it's not a
> "native" OS X applications, lots of little and not so little details
> don't work as expected. However, I think they did a pretty decent job,
> and they have announced major improvements in that regard for the next
> release, which is supposed to be available sometime next year IIRC.
>
Just to clarify, LispWorks on OS X is very much a native OS X/Cocoa
application. But you are correct, there are many details that don't
follow OS X interface guidelines. It has a very nice Objective-C
interface, so just about anything is possible. But it is not always
easy. Overall, I think LispWorks has done good job in a relatively short
time to have one of the best Mac Lisps available.
Best,
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL
alex goldman wrote:
> Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
> Downloadable applications are a little hard to come by.
you can try my Aqueduct game (still very beta), but it has only a window,
some buttons and a graphics area, but it is the same source for all 3
platforms, Windows, MacOS X and some Linux X11 window managers:
http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/aqueduct.html
--
Frank Bu�, ··@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Hello!
Frank Buss <··@frank-buss.de> wrote:
>alex goldman wrote:
>> Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
>> Downloadable applications are a little hard to come by.
>you can try my Aqueduct game (still very beta), but it has only a window,
>some buttons and a graphics area, but it is the same source for all 3
>platforms, Windows, MacOS X and some Linux X11 window managers:
How do you make an application WM dependent on X11? :-(
>http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/aqueduct.html
Kind regards,
Hannah.
Hannah Schroeter wrote:
> How do you make an application WM dependent on X11? :-(
>
>>http://www.frank-buss.de/lisp/aqueduct.html
it needs only some Motif or LessTif library, not a special window manager.
--
Frank Bu�, ··@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 06:45:15 -0700, alex goldman <·····@spamm.er> wrote:
> I know of Regexp Coach, which incidentally is not available for OS
> X, and that's pretty much it.
I have a Mac version of Regex Coach that I can send to you if you
email me privately. It's not a release version because it has some
issues with threads but it should give you an idea about how this app
looks on OS X.
> 2. How much platform-dependent tweaking is necessary.
The issue I mentioned above raised its head because I fiddled around
with the internal of editor panes. Other than that, the source code
is identical for Windows, OS X, and Linux except for some very minor
modifications (ten lines or so) for the Linux version.
Using the documented CAPI features you can pretty much write code that
runs on all three platforms without any tweaking at all. Of course,
if you want your app to look and feel like a fully "native" citizen of
its host OS you're likely do write some platform-dependent code.
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
alex goldman <·····@spamm.er> writes:
> Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
Prime Trader is written with Lispworks, I don't know whether it uses
CAPI:
http://www.netfonds.no/pt.php
http://espen.vestre.net/eclm05/ev-ams-2005.pdf
Paolo
--
Why Lisp? http://lisp.tech.coop/RtL%20Highlight%20Film
Recommended Common Lisp libraries/tools:
- ASDF/ASDF-INSTALL: system building/installation
- CL-PPCRE: regular expressions
- UFFI: Foreign Function Interface
On Sun, 17 Jul 2005 20:01:27 +0200, Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> wrote:
> Prime Trader is written with Lispworks, I don't know whether it uses
> CAPI:
>
> http://www.netfonds.no/pt.php
> http://espen.vestre.net/eclm05/ev-ams-2005.pdf
It does. Here are more examples:
<http://www.xanalys.com/solutions/linkexplorer.html>
<http://pgedit.com/>
<http://www.ystok.ru/products/tournament.html>
<http://www.rocketdownload.com/details/Self/6724.htm>
To the OP: You can bet that if there weren't significantly more than
these few apps using CAPI then LispWorks wouldn't enhance and maintain
it anymore. I'm currently working on a Win32 CAPI application for a
customer of mine and I have delivered another one this year and three
in the last year. All of them are/were custom-tailored and
single-copy and it's highly unlikely that you'll ever see them. The
same probably applies to many other commercial CAPI programs.
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
A quick question regarding the licensing terms for lispworks.
In order to deliver apps for Windows / MacOSX / Linux for your CAPI
apps, you need 3x lispworks pro license?
What about web apps? The free alternatives are easy. Just install them
on the server host and run your code.
Let's say I use Lispworks on freebsd to write the web app, do I need to
buy a copy of lispworks for each of the server that I deploy?
If not, how do I install the "runtime" w/ REPL so I can start it with
detachtty?
Thanks,
-- Mac
nsr wrote:
> A quick question regarding the licensing terms for lispworks.
>
> In order to deliver apps for Windows / MacOSX / Linux for your CAPI
> apps, you need 3x lispworks pro license?
Yes.
>
> What about web apps? The free alternatives are easy. Just install them
> on the server host and run your code.
>
> Let's say I use Lispworks on freebsd to write the web app, do I need to
> buy a copy of lispworks for each of the server that I deploy?
>
> If not, how do I install the "runtime" w/ REPL so I can start it with
> detachtty?
Even for web apps you need the pro or enterprise version to deliver it
with LispWorks. Each version only creates stand-alone executables for
the platform it runs on. Of course, you could develop with LispWorks and
deliver with something else if you did not need any of the LispWorks
tools in delivery.
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL
On 18 Jul 2005 16:26:36 -0700, "nsr" <········@gmail.com> wrote:
> A quick question regarding the licensing terms for lispworks.
>
> In order to deliver apps for Windows / MacOSX / Linux for your CAPI
> apps, you need 3x lispworks pro license?
Yes.
> What about web apps? The free alternatives are easy. Just install
> them on the server host and run your code.
>
> Let's say I use Lispworks on freebsd to write the web app, do I need
> to buy a copy of lispworks for each of the server that I deploy?
>
> If not, how do I install the "runtime" w/ REPL so I can start it
> with detachtty?
You can develop on your local machine and then deliver an executable
that's accesible via a remote REPL if you don't need COMPILE-FILE on
the remote machine. See this thread
<http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.lisp.lispworks.general/3948>
for more info. That way you don't need licenses for the servers.
Cheers,
Edi.
--
Lisp is not dead, it just smells funny.
Real email: (replace (subseq ·········@agharta.de" 5) "edi")
alex goldman wrote:
> Is anyone actually using CAPI for cross-platform GUI development?
> Downloadable applications are a little hard to come by. I know of Regexp
> Coach, which incidentally is not available for OS X, and that's pretty much
> it.
I'm using it for cross platform GUI development. You can download demo
versions of my SQL editor at http://pgedit.com/.
>
> I'd like to know
>
> 1. How native the look and feel is on Windows and OS X.
Pretty good overall, but some areas need work. The editor does not feel
platform native and uses non-standard scroll bars. But all of the
controls (including text fields) are generated by the OS. Both platforms
provide a foreign interface to address tasks that CAPI does not support.
>
> 2. How much platform-dependent tweaking is necessary.
>
Some. But all of my interfaces are in a single file for both platforms
with various bits and pieces conditionalized.
Best,
John DeSoi, Ph.D.
http://pgedit.com/
Power Tools for PostgreSQL