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The State Of The GTK+ File Selector
Anonymous BillyGoat writes "The next stable release of GTK+ (from the 2.4x series) will have a new file selector, and of recent, a lot of activity has been going on around that. One of the GNOME artmasters, Tigert, has released a mockup of the new file selector and the GTK developers are busy working towards that. Meanwhile the people from OSNews have some other ideas, while an OSNews reader has made even better mockups."
Very, very nice work. But the obvious technical merits of KDE aren't enough to convince those who feel irrational and emotional about two things: Qt's "corporate" status, and a visceral hatred for C++. I can't figure either of these things out. If you want to write GPL'd code with Qt, go ahead. If you want to develop commercial software, buy a license (a miniscule cost for any software shop). It's pretty simple. And the weird conspiracy theories about Trolltech and SCO are just laughable.
The C vs. C++ thing is also tough. I suspect a lot of people feel some sort of strange allegiance to the "traditional" Unix way, and believe C solves all problems equally well as C++ because hey, that's what Unix (and Linux, and so forth) uses. This just isn't true, of course, especially when it comes to reusability. And generic programming (most crucially, the STL) simply isn't possible in C. These days, I can't imagine programming in a strongly typed language without templates. Why not admit that C is a specialised language, and that better languages exist to build a desktop framework? I don't get it. I look at the Gnome source code and shudder. It just reminds me so much of writing GUI code for Windows 3.1 and 95 (yes, I've done that).