Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!turnkey!orchard.la.locus.com!prodnet.la.locus.com!jfr From: jfr@locus.com (Jon Rosen) Newsgroups: comp.windows.x.motif Subject: Re: XmListDeleteItemsPos bug?? Message-ID: <24232@oolong.la.locus.com> Date: 9 May 91 17:52:21 GMT References: <54456@inkwell.UUCP> <2899@istop.ist.CO.UK> Organization: Locus Computing Corp, Los Angeles Lines: 31 In article jason@cs.odu.edu (Jason "dedos" Austin) writes: > > The nice thing about X is that it's expandable. You can >easily create new widgets by adding to existing ones. No one could >possibly come up with a widget set for all situations, so it's left >open to the programmers to expand as they see fit. Good point, but it is NOT SIMPLE TO DO and the Motif toolkit is abysmal... The previous author's post indicated some valid concerns about missing widget functionality, similar to some that I have posted here (multi- column lists, highlighting (not selecting) items in lists, etc)... The Macintosh came out in 1984 (and the Lisa a year before that) and had many features and some missing ones... That is NOT startling since the Mac was really the first widely used GUI-based product... Since then, the Mac has made many new features available, including the ones named above and others... These were mostly known by early 1987 when the Motif effort actually started... Therefore, it is hard to believe that the OSF group did not attempt to incorporate as many of these features as possible into Motif... Certainly Motif made some strides in different areas.... The form widget, particularly, is a major stride given that it removes the need for a programmer to deal with constant resizing of subordinate objects when a window is resized... This has always been a gripe I have had about Mac (and early Windows.. I do not know if Windows 3.0 solved this problem)... But stil, multi-column lists is obvious... and not hard to implement from a systems perpspective... But if I am an application programmer, it may be WAY beyond my abilities to do that... I just want the tools to do my job... Jon Rosen