[news.eclipse.platform.swt] Re: SWT/eclipse closer to native mac apps

[Laurent Mihalkovic <ljp_m@xxxxxxx>]

Thanks for your thanks

No worries... I worked on this because I needed to do something for an interview... so working on this was lazy on my part (I spent a couple days last week). More importantly, I also needed a goal to make myself play with JNA for another project, so the first version was JNA before I made it 100% SWT. 

Short version: I won't shed a tear if you guys decide to turn it down, I don't mind rewriting it if you think it is useful but not in the philosophy, and I don't mind building a Cocoa version in parallel... i actually enjoy working inside swt.
you'll see that I made an effort to make my changes to jnigen files in the same manner as the current code in there, but again, no sweat if it all goes in the trash. my reward is the fact that eclipse is no longer an eye soar on my desktop. this is not a criticism... I am truly thankful that it actually does exist at all (I have been working with eclipse since 2.xx, on win32 at the time).. so I have a vested interest in making sure it does become a platform of choice.

before I send a patch, I'll finish support for segmented views. I think this is a useful thing to help promote SWT itself as an alternative to Swing... but this is just my thoughts.

Grant Gayed wrote:

Hi Laurent,

Firstly, thanks for your efforts!  I would suggest concentrating on making
them work in swt's in-progress Cocoa port (see
http://www.eclipse.org/swt/cocoaport.php ).  It's too late for changes like
this to go in for 3.4, and the hope is that by 3.5 the Cocoa port will
become the real one.

The best way to submit changes is with patches attached to bug reports.
It's difficult to prescribe an exact shape for the changes to take because
any change that has the potential to affect api (eg.- do all tool items
automatically go up there or only client-specified ones?) is not taken
lightly. 

because I recognize that this is not a technical question as much as a choice that belongs more to you than to me, I stayed out of this. at the moment, my goal was:
 - build support at the SWT level, doing it as much as possible in the philosophy of
 - try to support Actions (menu manager affected)
 - move perspective switching to the mac toolbar (I think I have a clear view of all the dependencies)
 - then i ventured into a custom Presentation to make it look nicer

 It's not likely that a change of this size would be merged as-is
anyways, but if 90% of it is then a huge effort has been saved on this end.
The biggest contribution is seeing the new OS calls working; massaging the
code shape afterwards is straightforward.

Regarding future changes like this, I would suggest first logging bug
reports with SWT, setting the OS to "Mac OSX - Cocoa", and putting some
words like "I can investigate this, would this feature be desirable?". 

got it...

I suggest this just because I would not want work to be done that never had
a chance of going in.  Decisions regarding enhancements like this are often
made by multiple people, so I don't want to unilaterally state here what
would or wouldn't be taken.

Grant
  

thx for your answers.
lm/

"Laurent Mihalkovic" <ljp_m@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:fv7608$sa3$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx...
  

Hi Tom,

Yes, I am interested in getting the code pushed inside eclipse, rather
than maintain my own side pet project. I saw that last month someone had
opened a bug for the very same problem. If people from the SWT group
define more specifically how they want things. I will morph my code into
it to increase the chances of acceptance.

If you look at this bug report, I attached a screenshot of my workbench:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=222859
It is running with a 'Mac OS Presentation'. Is there a chance that
something like that would make it to the workbench distribution? Should
I open a bug for that ? (even if the presentation has no interest for
the eclipse team, it requires a tiny change to one class in the
workbench in order to work).

cheers,
lm/



Tom Schindl wrote:
    

Hi Laurent,

The way to go is to submit a bug against Platform/SWT or Platform/UI
and attach the code. This assumes that you want to make it opensource
under EPL.

Tom

Laurent Mihalkovic schrieb:
      

last sunday I started looking into getting SWT apps to feel more like
native Mac OS apps. In the first version, I extended SWT with some
quickly hacked JNA code as a proof of concept of supporting native
Mac OS Toolbars. as it did work, I rewrote the code with native SWT
changes (the many additions to OS.java were trivial thanks to JNIgen).

At the moment I am working on supporting split views (I want to move
the perspective switcher to the Mac toolbar, as a square looking
split view). as I was there, I wrote a simple custom presentation
that makes eclipse look a lot closer to a native mac app. For that
one, I have had to make a tiny change to workench ui. how do I go
about getting some of this integrated into SWT and workbench?

very best.

        

-- 
Laurent Mihalkovic, co-author SWT/JFace in Action
    

(www.manning.com/scarpino)
  

-- 
Laurent Mihalkovic, co-author SWT/JFace in Action (www.manning.com/scarpino)