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#Gui toolkit for native osx gui download windows

SWT tried to automate this to some degree, and once again, it gets it right for simple UI tasks. One can automate the most common cases for very simple user interfaces, but many if not most UI tasks require a much finer touch.

But the UI guidelines for most environments are not as simple as the basics of "this is what a button looks like." There are many subtler differences, from the spacing between UI elements to the order in which certain well-known actions should appear in a list to the exact position of the Preferences/Options dialog in the menu system.

#Gui toolkit for native osx gui download windows

It's not hard to make a button that looks like an OSX button, or a Windows button, or that of any other toolkit. On desktop applications, this is just annoying and breaks user expectations. The solution taken by Swing is to emulate various systems, which fails spectacularly.Īnd then there is cross-platform consistency, the idea that your app can look exactly the same on all systems (often chosen by games, where this increases immersion). The only realistic solution is to forget about pixel-exact layout, and to write to a common interface which abstracts over over system-specific toolkits. The only real solution is to re-write the application for each system (thus ignoring Java's cross-platform benefits). These issues can't be solved through a simple stylesheet when they touch on the behavior or general layout of the application.

What is expected to be draggable? Where are context menus expected?.

How do we incorporate other color schemes?.

How do scrollbars look? Where are the buttons – if they have any? How wide are they, or are they only revealed when the pointer moves into a certain region?.

Is the background of a window a single color, an image, or a gradient? Let's just put that into a stylesheet as well.

How are the fonts rendered? As crisp as possible, or smooth and antialiased? And what font should be used? Note that different fonts have different metrics, so the same paragraph rendered to the same width may have a different number of lines depending on the font.

Is the menu bar part of the window (Windows, optionally KDE), or does it sit at the top of the screen (Mac, Unity)? Fair enough, let's write a different implementation for each system, as we've already thrown away pixel-exact layout.

How would this be translated to Mac, where the Ribbon isn't common? Fair enough, let's forget pixel-exact layout and provide a different toolbar implementation for each system.

On Windows, the “Ribbon” concept is rather native.

How do we mark the default button on a screen? Color tinting, bold font, enlarging the button? Fair enough, let's put that in a stylesheet.

In a dialog, on which side does the “OK” button belong – on the left or on the right? Fair enough, let's build a separate dialog for each system.

The look & feel of an application is not only determined by a “skin”, but also on the layout and how it behaves. Some of these have rather unique concepts or capabilities, and replicating them in a cross-platform toolkit is tedious. There are literally half a dozen of toolkits that could be considered “native” on some system.

It's a toolkit that uses JNI underneath to call native components - so if something doesn't look right there, it's not going to be because of the look and feel. You specifically mention SWT not looking native, which is a bit odd, because SWT is native. I'm saying all the above based on Swing, which is of course a lightweight, non-native GUI toolkit. This is much less severe than it used to be - these days if I set the default platform look and feel in Swing, I notice very little that looks odd. For copyright reasons, developers often can't just use these existing graphics outright, so they have to be recreated - and while they do a good job for the most part, inevitably some things get missed given the huge array of graphical components out there.

These days the graphics used to represent GUI components aren't as simple as random bitmaps that are stretched (since these don't scale very well at all) - they're often vector based graphics with a lot of corner cases programmed into them (so when the button reaches the edge of the screen it may look slightly different, for instance.) And of course, you'll need different graphics when a button is clicked. But this might be harder than you imagine. Isn't it only a matter of designing buttons that look like 'native' buttons?