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From: uad1077@dircon.uucp (Ian Kemmish)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: Re: MOTIF vs Athena. Practical to conditionalize?
Message-ID: <1990PMThu.13.10635@dircon.uucp>
Date: 13 Dec 90 22:33:56 GMT
References: <3132@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> <7036@mitech.com> <3165@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>
Organization: The Direct Connection, UK
Lines: 60

In article <3165@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu> etaylor@wilkins.iaims.bcm.tmc.edu (Eric Taylor) writes:
>
> 
>|> Here is a question. How difficult is it to conditionalize or
>|> abstract ones code such that different widget sets can be used
>|> depending on the local configuration/availability?
>|> 
>|> Then if somebody has the MOTIF set on his system your application
>|> could look 3d/MOTIF, and if *not* then you would use Athena
>|> (and the person would probably not notice the difference, not being
>|> *used* to the 3d look, since he doesn't have it on his machine).
>|> 
>|> -gjc
>|> 
>|> p.s. Just a suggestion in the form of a question.
>
>
>Sometimes it is not too hard.  It your application is nothing
>but a bunch of buttons then it is a snap.
>
>However, sometimes it is not so easy.  For instance, toggle
>widgets are handled completely differently in Athena Widgets
>than they are in MOTIF (when using mutually exclusive toggles).
>

Hmmm, my news program appears to have dropped one or more attributions.

Sorry.

If you know beforehand that you want a portable program, then life is
not too bad.  I have a 15,000 drawing program, based loosely on
Freehand from Aldus for the Mac.  Of this, about 2,000 each are for
Motif or Athena.  They are in separate files.  The main body of the
program is driven almost entirely by callbacks from this code.
There are only a couple of dozen lines with ifdefs in the rest of
the program.  These are mostly to handle interrogating and forcing
sets of radio buttons.

The biggest problem so far was getting *just* a shift button press
event.  In Athena it works no problem.   In Motif, I only ever
seemed to get it at the next `normal' event.  Yuk.

The second biggest problem was having dialogue boxes that can accept
text.  Motif seems to be very picky about exaclty what type of shell
widgets you use.  Athena is a lot more permissive.

The third biggest problem was the general size, sloth and bugginess
of Motif, both in design and implementation.  Still struggling with
that one.

Compared to Motif, doing NURBS in a window system with no graphics
library to speak of was almost easy!

Hope this helps.

-- 
Ian D. Kemmish                    Tel. +44 767 601 361
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