O'Reilly Motif Books On-Line and Free 21
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."
One thing that Motif was getting right... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Why people don't use Motif (Score:2, Informative)
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
Truth must be told. (Score:1, Informative)
I know this might sound like a troll, but you can't
expect a sane developer to ship a GUI on time, with
nothing but list boxes, dialogs, text fields, menues and labels.
Some might say that is all you will ever need, or that
you can assemble any other widgets from those basic
ones as needed, but why bother do that when other
toolkits give me property sheets, combo boxes, tabbed views, rich toolbars (dragable, detachable, with animated bitmaps, and even with support for other control embedding.)
rich text support, and entire grids for spread sheet
and database applications. Document/View architectures (aka. MVC)
and rich OO class hierchies.
Guys, the days of hand coding everything are over.
MFC gives me all I need on Win32, and Qt on Unix;
someone else might appreciate Motif, but thank you
very much, not me.
This offcourse goes against the longs standing
trend of clapping for everything new. As always,
O'Reilly gets my respect (I knew about the books
for two months, and I was one of the first volunteers to convert them to PDF from the troff
sources.)
Re:A valuable resource for whom? (Score:3, Informative)
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,