27 May
2006
27 May
'06
10:18 p.m.
On Saturday 27 May 2006 22:36, Timo Kreuzer wrote:
I think few of the devs ever read the Design forum
(???)
There are a some nice GUI designs, mostly done with a drawing program.
So I thought it would be great to make those designs available inside
ROS. Some of them (I think kokodin made a good and quite good
programmable design) could be done by changing the user32 code, but it's
not a good idea to make theming by changing user32 code. So I had the
following idea: all code really needed to draw the GUI elements could be
exported into an external dll (gui.dll or something like that) so some
basic theming would be pretty easy and still fast. We would only need a
kind of GUI API that would allow changing most things, but would not be
too complex.
What do you think of this?
If you think it's a good idea, I would try to outsource the gui code out
of user32 and try to develop a basic and a secondary (based on kokodin's
design) dll.
This is similar to what MS did in XP. They made the GDI depend on another DLL
for all interface drawing. IIRC, this interface isn't detailed anywhere on
MS's site, but the last time I looked was late 2001 so that could have
changed.
If ROS aims to be NT4 compliant implementing this system isn't necessary.
However, for themeing, I can see it being very useful. I haven't checked the
QT license in a long time, but it's quite possible that ROS could ship with
interfaces based on GTK, QT and any other X widget set imaginable. This
would, I believe, provide a major point of difference between ROS and
Windows and potentially help draw more users to the project.
DRH