Posted by
Michael Schmid on
Dec 04, 2009; 11:29am
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/ImageJ-development-involvement-contributions-tp3690030p3690075.html
Hi Volker, Raymond,
the preference of AWT instead of Swing might be strange for Java
aficionados, but having the look and feel of the operating system
(Windows, Mac, or whatever Window manager) makes life easier, not
only for the average user but also for 'power users' who
subconsciously recognize the buttons, highlighted input fields, etc.
are if they have the usual appearance.
An example of the Swing GUI that has found its way into ImageJ is
Plugins>Utilities>Find Commands. On Windows the buttons are so dull
that one has to look twice to recognize them as such.
In addition, there are special and very useful operating system
features that get lost with Swing. E.g., on the Mac one can drag and
drop of files and folders from the "Finder" (Mac name for "File
Manager") into open or save dialogs. Losing this would make me (and
other Mac users) very hostile against Swing.
On the other hand, the user does not care about the inner workings of
ImageJ. Making things less dependent on the GUI is, in principle, a
good idea. ImageJ has started more than 10 years ago as a small Java
applet, probably without the expectation that it would grow so much
and be also used differently than in interactive mode; with these
prospects at the beginning it would probably have a different design.
Concerning such changes at the current stage, the main problem is
preserving compatibility with plugins - I guess that there are
thousands of them, and many rely heavily on the internal structure.
So far a personal view,
Michael
________________________________________________________________
On 3 Dec 2009, at 11:26, Volker Baecker wrote:
(...)
> Now what concerns swing. (...)
> It has been discussed many times here. There is an important part
> of the
> ImageJ community that is absolutely hostile against swing. I
> personally
> don't understand why (I think these are mainly mac users and that
> swing
> might have caused problems in older mac versions).
> On the other hand this is not so much of a problem since you can
> always
> use swing for your own plugins / or imagej based tools even if the
> ImageJ base windows are not using it.
(...)