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Re: Appearance Drawing Questions

On 5/30/03 2:48 PM, Duane Murphy didst favor us with:

> Does this strike anyone as odd? There seems to be a kind of mismatch here.
>
> There is this great Aqua UI designed and presented by Apple.
> There are several controls designed and presented by Apple.
> There is an API that lets you build your own controls from scratch.
> But you cant draw them to look like Aqua.

I don't see this as a mismatch. "Controls" are much more generalized now
than they were originally, and many of them have no real "Aqua" appearance.
Static text controls, disclosure triangles, group boxes, and so on don't
really look Aqua, and "custom control" can mean almost anything now.
>
> I understand that "many" people are using the new control APIs. Most of
> them from what I can tell are building composite controls (that is
> controls made from other controls). While it is possible to build a low
> level raw control, it is virtually impossible to make it look like the
> rest of the interface.
>
I don't really see a solution. Apple settled on an interface design which
relies on the talents of graphics artists and the Photoshop engineers at
Adobe. While it might seem like it would be nice to have an API which would
fill a region with an appropriate Aqua look, I think the reality is that it
would be slow and almost certainly not do what the developer wanted for some
shapes. I can easily imagine it would work well for circles, but then some
developer would complain that it doesn't give the look he expects for stars
with five-points or his padlock-shaped control. I also can't help but wonder
if an API to do something like this wouldn't be abused and we'd have little
blue Aqua-looking widgets all over the place. ;-)

Larry
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References: 
 >Re: Appearance Drawing Questions (From: "Duane Murphy" <email@hidden>)



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