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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."

4 of 21 comments (clear)

  1. Why people don't use Motif by Adrian+Voinea · · Score: 3, Insightful

    A lot of people are very hesitant to install a whole set of libraries to run only one application -- almost no matter how good the app is -- when there are 'good enough' alternatives for the standard libs they already have.

    Do you feel that NEdit has suffered from not using more popular libraries, and does it matter to you?

  2. 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.

  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,

  4. Motif? by DGolden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not that I like motif in particular , but one thing that it gets right and that Qt and Gtk suck at is using the X Window System to its full advantage.

    Motif apps, like netscape 4.x, tend to support established X mechanisms for things - like the X resource database (a very good generalised application preferences database, somewhat akin to the windows registry, but less sucky and more human-readable) - they tend to support the editres protocol, they generally integrate better with the X window system Xt infrastructure. Qt and Gtk go off and implement their own half-assed preferences systems and ignore the solid work that exists in X (presumably because Qt and to some extent Gtk are intended to work well on non-X platforms)

    It's almost as if the toolkit authors went off and started implementing their toolkits without bothering to study how X had already solved 3/4 of their problems...

    If you still have ns 4.x or other motif applications around, fire it up, fire up editres, and have a play around - the end-user dynamic configuation abilities are more still more advanced than either Qt or Gtk, and the only other toolkit that I can think of that is comparably easily end-user configurable at runtime is amiga MUI (and xaw, but that starts out looking quite crappy.)

    --
    Choice of masters is not freedom.