Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

O'Reilly Motif Books On-Line and Free

Posted by timothy on from the paperless-office-of-the-future dept.

MightyMicro writes "According to the Motifdeveloper community site, the O'Reilly Motif Programming Manual and Reference Guide are now available for free download from Imperial Software's site. As Open Motif is also free for Linux (and xBSD), this looks like a valuable resource."

3 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. One thing that Motif was getting right... by Adrian+Voinea · · Score: 3, Informative

    One more thing...
    Last time I used Motif (about 2 years ago, on Irix) was that it had a working and fairly powerful drag and drop. Granted, they changed the API right in the middle of things, which sucked, but I could (and did) write an application where any user could drag "film rolls" (an object in our system) onto the desktop, and then drag them from the desktop into other programs that knew something about "film rolls" and that program could process the film roll. Programs that didn't know anything about film roll object just got the file name where the film roll was stored, but applications that knew about film rolls got all sorts of other characteristics of the film roll in the drop message without opening the file.

    I haven't figured out how to do similar dragging and dropping on the desktop or between applications with KDE or Gnome. I'm pretty sure it's there, but it doesn't seem as integrated as it did on Irix.

  2. Re:Why people don't use Motif by iainf · · Score: 2, Informative

    Unless it was released as open source sometime I didn't notice you still have to pay for Motif which pretty much rules it out in the Linux world.

    You must have been asleep! It's available for free, but under conditions, and RMS doesn't like the licence...

    http://www.opengroup.org/openmotif/license/
    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motif.html

  3. Re:A valuable resource for whom? by elflord · · Score: 3, Informative
    The other comment is obviously false, maybe the other poster is thinking of Solaris workstations that have very primitive graphics hardware.

    However, there's no comparison between Motif and. KDE has a distributed object model, a solid foundation (Qt), and a rich set of widgets, including everything Qt provides (including collection classes, network support, and XML support), and KDEs add-ons. Because it's usable in OO languages, extending and adding widgets is a piece of cake.

    Cheers,