Ok fair enough. As you can probably tell, I'm only just getting involved so I'm oblivious to these earlier discussions. You'll have to excuse my bullishness.
I've been using Inkscape heavily for about a year now, and it's been really great seeing it grow an develop. One thing I notice quite regularly is that because this a GTK app, it is inevitably primarily designed for Gnome. An example of this problem is the edit box I-beam cursor. In 0.45.1 when you hover over an edit box in windows you get a GTK style I-beam, rather than the windows system I-beam. I'm very glad that this has now been fixed in the developement builds. A second example is scrollbars. When you scroll to the maximum or minimum extent, the arrow buttons grey out. That behaviour makes sense, but it's not Windows standard, so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
I guess I got a similar impression of the file dialogs. Far from making me feel like a first class citizen, it made me feel like it was one of those linuxy things that noone had got round to fixing sorting out yet - Linux being the primary platform for the project, and I being a mere "M$ Windoze" user. I definitely don't think we should add more options to resolve this - as they tend to be an excuse for dodging hard design decisions. I agree that it would be a shame to loose bookmarks and preview, but then I don't think many Windows users will know what they're missing. Instead they'll be happy that the application has the humility to "play the Windows game the Windows way".
I think it's quite important that we try and show Windows users that we take their platform sersously, because the majority of developers work on that platform, so we could do with attracting their input to get more inovation, and faster progress.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bob Jamison" <rwjj@...127...> To: "Joel Holdsworth" <joel@...1709...>; inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Sent: Tuesday, June 26, 2007 5:46 PM Subject: SPAM-LOW: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Getting the GdkWindow in which a verb was invoked
Joel Holdsworth wrote:
Are you saying that at some stage there was suport for native windows file dialogs which was then removed? If so why was this? and if I was to add the support in once again would I be reversing some community decision from a while ago? if that decision was made, on what grounds was it made?
Yes, almost 3 years ago, we had a lot of talks about this, and the general consensus was to move to the new GtkFileChooser for consistency, for the bookmarks, and for the nifty Preview.
This was part of the work to make win32 not be perceived as a second-class port of the code, but rather another supported build.
Maybe having a preferences.xml option to show the old dialog as an option would be good. Or maybe a control on each dialog that would switch to the alternate view. But it would NOT be a good idea to disable the GtkFileChooser for all win32 users. Far, far too much work has gone into it to throw it away.
bob