NeoOffice GUI

[M-Rick]

Do you know this interface library ?

http://www.randelshofer.ch/quaqua/download.html

[sardisson]

This won't help anyone any more than porting gtk or Qt to Mac OS X. OOo (and thus Neo) uses Sun's (Star Division's) own cross-platform widget toolkit, vcl, and the only way to get an Aqua-looking vcl is to use the N*F frameworks (invented by Ed and Dan in Neo/C) and program your own Aqua N*F vcl extensions.

Pure Java apps (which Neo is not) on Mac OS X already have an Aqua LAF, although I'll admit that library makes the app "more Aqua" than most pure Java apps.

Smokey

[OPENSTEP]

It is a good reference, though, especially for anyone who's looking at doing the file picker implementation. The Swing component offers the filtering and such we need for OOo, but the Swing filepicker isn't implemented using native filepickers...it's implemented in Swing. Thus you're left with AWT (which has a *horrid* file picker) or redoing it in Carbon/Cocoa native. Right now my recommendation is still to go Carbon/Cocoa on the filepicker, but if this offers an easier binding via Java it may be worthwhile.

The overall Aqua LAF, though, still is a world away. I'm toying with punting on x86 and letting someone else do the heavy lifting and instead jumping off into NWF for Neo 2.0. I can do NWF on my PowerPC machines (which I'll have until they pry them from my cold, dead hands)

ed

[jakeOSX]

ed, does that mean that you have to use AWT and not swing? (i found code for a swing file picker)

as for the cocoa, now it has been a while, but when I was looking into it, basically you just run a line of code, but I couldn't figure out how to call that (or where to). I assumed that Patrick did something similar with the print scheme, but my non-web programming is not so hot...

[pluby]

Give Ed and I credit: showing a native dialog is trivial. The problem is that making sure that it does not cause the OOo code to hang and feeding all of OOo's callback functions with data whenever something changes while in the native dialog is what is not trivial. It is these non-trivial items that are the reason why we have put native filepickers in the low priority category. If the print dialog was any indication of the work involved, it will take less than a week to implement but we'll spend a good three months chasing down all of the bugs after our first implementation.

Patrick

[rays]

[jakeOSX]

[OPENSTEP]

jake: Yup, from Java itself you'd need to display the file picker from AWT and not from Swing. The Swing filepicker is a "platform independent" filepicker and does similar kinds of things like the OOo filepicker (e.g. not display the same sidebar as in the finder, have to navigate through Volumes folder for extra hard drives/partitions, etc.).

The AWT filepicker is implemented through the real file dialogs of OS X and not some platform-independent abstraction (like Swing). The bummer is that, on OS X, the AWT filepicker doesn't do filtering of files based on extensions, while Swing does, so doing things like adding different formats to a "save as" menu won't fly

The only thing I can think of is to go through native dialogs which can be extended unlike their java counterparts.

ed

[ovvldc]

[OPENSTEP]

Well, granted, I just looked at the screenshot, but I don't think the library is of any help. The filepicker doesn't have a "formats" menu for choosing the different supported formats for save/load nor custom controls and preview areas for selected files.

Granted, my knowledge is restricted to the AWT implementation of Apple VM 1.3.1, but there's no way to do a native filepicker with filter menus and custom controls from Java. All you can do is suck it up and use a real API

ed

[pluby]

[neoeddy]

It would be great to have the savings dialog "mac-like" - I know, that the missing of this dialog-window, is for many Mac-Users the only reason not to get more in contact with Neooffice! Hopefully it will be part of one of the next releases.

[OPENSTEP]

This is on a list of things to do, but getting 2.0 working is our first priority. Any new developer looking to jump on board can take a peek at the ancient design proposal I wrote up at:

http://www.dashboardbuddha.com/OOo/specs/index.html

Note: It's been sitting there since 2003. No one, either here nor at OOo, has taken it up. Not sure if that's a sign of anything meaningful...

ed

[jakeOSX]

i did look into it, first at the cocoa calls that bring up the save dialogue, and even found some java code that uses swing to display a 'save as' dialogue that looks surprisingly good on a mac.

however, it would seem that both paths are the wrong tree =\

[OPENSTEP]

The swing problem is that you don't get the sidebar or other standard Mac controls. The Cocoa approach will probably work and is probably the recommended approach now that we're on the Cocoa-based virtual machines. I honestly haven't looked into expanding Cocoa dialogs with custom controls as of yet.

ed