GTK+OSX for Mac OS X Aqua

Scott Sheppard writes "GTK+OSX has released a native Mac OS X Aqua port of the Linux-based GTK+ open source graphical user interface library. GTK+ (GIMP Toolkit) is a popular widget library supporting graphical applications for Linux. GTK+OSX version 0.1 is an alpha release intended for developers." This could make The Gimp cozy for MacHeads without installing XDarwin and OroborOSX. Looking good!

Comments

This could make The Gimp cozy for MacHeads??

[mustangdavis]

This could make The Gimp cozy for MacHeads

I don't think so!

Although it is pricey, all the "MacHeads" still are trained on (and prefer) Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately, that is still a superior product when it comes to image manipulation. Yes, GIMP has come quite a ways (and I use it for personal stuff since Adobe P.S. is so pricey), but it is hard to compete with a product that does such a great job and that has become an industry standard.

Nice thought, but it ain't gonna happen! Too many graphi designers have spent too many years of their lives learning how to use all of the features of Photoshop .... they're not goning to convert just because GIMP is suddenl available for OSX. If they wanted GIMP, they would have installed Linux on their Mac years ago and used it then.

Although I think it is great that GTK is now on Mac, I don't think it will change "things" that much ...

Just my $0.02 cents

Re:This could make The Gimp cozy for MacHeads??

[babbage]

On one level you're right -- Photoshop is in most ways & by most opinions a superior tool compared to the Gimp, and most oldschool Mac users will not be impressed by the Gimp. On the other hand, a lot of newschool Mac users are oldschool Unix users, and a lot of those folks are only passingly interested in creative graphics software. For that segment, noodling around in the Gimp is just fine, and makes far more sense than shelling out a few hundred bucks for the professional grade graphic designers' software. In short, the Mac ecosystem is diverse enough to support both applications just fine.

More importantly, the real gain here is the GTK+ toolkit, not just the most prominent application written with that toolkit. Being one of those unix/mac users, I'm not particularly interested in the Gimp -- but I'd love to be able to use an Aqua-native version of Gvim every day, and with a native GTK+ port there are now a huge number of other GTK+ apps that can be brought over to OSX without forcing users to set up X11 as well. As another commenter noted, no, these will not really have the right look & feel for OSX -- menus attached to windows instead of the screen border is a mistake here -- but as a bridge framework for bringing graphical Unix software to the Mac, this is far better than having to run X11 alongside Aqua.

Won't make for nice "Mac apps"

[lpontiac]

I've been looking into cross platform toolkits myself recently. A major issue where the Mac is concerned is that it's not just the look, it's the feel; there are lots of nuances that will annoy Mac users if you don't get them right.

The screenshot shows a menu bar at the top of the Othello window, which breaks the most obvious rule of all - Mac app windows don't have a menu bar on them, instead there's a single menu bar up the top which changes depending upon the focus.

There's some specific gotchas in the wxWindows wiki, here.

Don't get me wrong, the GTK port is an achievement and I'm sure it will be very useful to a lot of people. But we'll never get to the point where someone can produce a decent Mac app by taking their Unix sources and recompiling.