Switch the look of app to more native look

General help specific to the Max OS X platform.
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karel
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2010 5:33 pm

Switch the look of app to more native look

Post by karel »

Hello,

I tried to play with Ecere SDK, since I randomly stumbled on it while reading this SO question (and I felt kind of sorry that not many developers know this IDE)

I have a Mac OS X. I don't actually mind the Windows look of the IDE, but I do mind the look of the resulting application. Is there some way to make to make the app look more.... os X-like? (even within the X11)

Thanks
jerome
Site Admin
Posts: 608
Joined: Sat Jan 16, 2010 11:16 pm

Re: Switch the look of app to more native look

Post by jerome »

Hi Karel,

I'm in a bit of a hurry right now as I'm off for the weekend, but I just want to let you know that we're working on some tweaks to get the native app look, at least for the window title bar and title buttons for now.

It's also possible to create your own skin...

Welcome in the Ecere developer community :)

Talk with you soon,

Jerome
karel
Posts: 3
Joined: Fri Aug 27, 2010 5:33 pm

Re: Switch the look of app to more native look

Post by karel »

Well, you can't really build 100% native looking GUI without Cocoa (or Carbon, but the documentation on Carbon is not very good, to say the least)

I think Qt is using HIThemes, which is Carbon's API, but it's not documented anywhere at all

I am now looking at the skinning

I am not sure how much time I will have for playing with Ecere, though; I have enough work with perl to school and with java to have something to eat, and I wanted to finally learn cocoa this school year, so my time is limited :)
jerome
Site Admin
Posts: 608
Joined: Sat Jan 16, 2010 11:16 pm

Re: Switch the look of app to more native look

Post by jerome »

Hi Karel,

With our current native window decoration tweak, the OSX window manager will take care of decorating the window borders.

You can then use your own custom skin to get your controls looking however you like, you can skin them in a way that better match the Aqua look and feel.

As for a Cocoa (or Carbon) driver, that's a nice wish to have but we don't have any plans or resources to attack it ourselves at the moment. Carbon would be nice, since it would be easier to access from eC. If we had Objective-C bi-directional bindings it would make things much easier to interface with Cocoa. I heard that Carbon will be deprecated at least in 64 bit (although that isn't an issue for Ecere at the moment since we're not there yet, but we hope to have 64 bit support in the near future).

I hope you get the chance to play at least a bit with Ecere!

Cheers,

Jerome
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