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."
Re:Why people don't use Motif (Score:2, Interesting)
The main reason that Mosaic was the first mega successful Web browser was that it was the first to use a GUI toolkit that did not look like crap. It was not actually the first Motif browser but it was the first with Motif look and feel. The other browsers looked like science projects.
Ten years later it is quite possible that Motif's time has come and gone. The Motif look is somewhat dated and the OSF licensing model is certainly dated. 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. I don't think that the chances of survival for the non-open source Unix world are very good these days.
What puzzles me is that these toolkits still need a rack of twenty manuals each of which is six inches thick. Its only a goddam menu system!
Re:A valuable resource for whom? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://unix.oreilly.com/news/motif_0400.html
I think his point about legacy code and the fact the Motif is on every UNIX is dead on. You may not like Motif, but odds are your employer might.
Motif? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)