Look and Feel in LC8

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter TB Brett wrote:

> On 11/03/2016 01:26, Roger Guay wrote:
>> Sorry if I missed this in prior posts, but what happened to the Look
>> and Feel option in the View menu? Isn’t this a serious omission?
>
> The "Look and Feel" options were removed from the menu bar, because it's
> technically impossible to make them work the way that users would
> naively expect them to work.
>
> Specifically, LiveCode 8 uses a "native" theme by default.  This
> requires platform-specific libraries to be available (for example, the
> OS X button is actually *drawn* by OS X, not by LiveCode, when you use
> the "native" theme).  OS X theming APIs are not available on Linux, and
> Windows theming APIs are not available on OS X, and so on.
>
> Enabling an OS X look and feel on Linux cannot result in the stack
> looking the way it would if you were running it on OS X.
>
> You can still set the look and feel from the message box or script.

I have to admit that as fun as the lookAndFeel property was for mocking 
up a NeXT-style menu palette once, in all the years I've been using LC 
I've never used that global property in anything I ship to end-users. 
Most folks just want their app to look like everything else on their 
system, and providing an alien-looking appearance just confuses them.

That said, it is sometimes fun to remember what ancient OSes looked like 
(the emulated options are all for things no longer in common use: 
Windows 95, Mac Classic, and Motif), so I just made this plugin -- 
public domain for anyone who wants it:

<http://fourthworld.net/lc/4W_LookandFeel.livecode>


Q for Peter: will Widgets like the On/Off toggle be updated to use 
OS-native appearances on OS X and Android?

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com