>  > Why bother creating yet another look and feel when we all use and are
>>  experienced with what comes with our native operating systems?
>Maybe because all of them are absolute junk. Windows is apalling, Mac is
>cretinous, Gnome &  KDE make windows almost look good, Acorn is
>ridiculous. I just about tolerate Acorn because I'm so used (innured?)
>to it, but really guys, they're all just pathetic.

So that is an argument for producing something that looks *almost* 
like Windows or Mac or whatever?  I'm sorry if my argument wasn't 
clear enough.  I was trying to put forward the following:

Proposition: Either do something radically different from current 
user interfaces or use those interfaces.


>
>>  1) Allow the use of native windows and widgets through an interface
>>  that means you can write code that will work across most of the
>>  deployed platforms with the look and feel of those platforms.
>This is just about doable. Portability in this is really difficult; I
>worked on a big project attacking it at ParcPlace. It shewed promise,
>but involved major work in FFI, callbacks, fixing bugs in the native
>widgets themselves. A mojor pain. During the work, we noticed that
>hardly any major applications actually used the native widgets anyway.
>M$ were particularly prone to this.
>There was a pretty damn good paper on this in the OOPSLA 95(?)
>proceedings.

You are right.  But what if you don't implement the entire interface 
natively?  Just the basic bits that everybody wants :-), like windows 
and dialogues and data entry.  With the rest, you can supply a 
Morphic rectangle which blits into part of a native window.


>  > 2) Develop a completely new and different user interface/experience
>>  that will be wicked and weird and beautiful and, generally, make
>>  people's jaws drop.
>I think that's what many of us are working on.
>>
>>
>>  Perhaps both could be done, but it seems to me to be a waste of time
>>  to write code to make Squeak look like another operating system.
>Web browsing presents a quite different UI to most OSs, and offers at
>least a chance that we can force open the door to something better. One
>of the things I particularly dislike about all the .NET BS is the
>transparent attempt by M$ to make the web look like windows. Yuck.

Isn't every web page/site, potentially, a different and unique user 
interface?  If that is true, isn't there issue with learning a site's 
interface every time you move from one to another?

Wow, I didn't know that about the .NET stuff.  Welcome to the brave 
new world of 1984?

Karl