Universal GUI (was Re: HIG...)

[Dan Shafer]

Richard Gaskins suggests that perhaps developers of the world need to 
take the issue of cross-platform GUI compatibility by the horns and 
wrestle it to the ground.

Nice idea, Richard, but it's a non-starter for two big reasons.

First, users will hate it. If you're a Windows user accustomed to doing 
some of the funky UI stuff Windows supports, you will not like using an 
app that behaves differently from your expectations. Cross-platform is 
meaningless to 99% of users. They expect things to work the right way 
on *their* platform of choice. They don't care how hard it is for us 
developers to make it that way.

Second, programmers will hate it. Consistency of UI is a bugaboo to 
developers, many of whom think they have a better/more creative/cooler 
way to do something.

Smalltalk tried -- and still tries -- to define "cross-platform" as 
meaning "looks same on all platforms." They don't get away with it, by 
and large. We wouldn't either.

Bottom line: if we're going to be multi-platform developers, we have to 
learn to develop so our apps look and behave natively on all targeted 
platforms. Rev comes much, much closer to supporting that ideal than 
any IDE or language of which I am aware. Especially Java. (yuk)