Bazaar Explorer by Pictures

[Jean-Francois Roy]

I forgot to mention BazaarX, an on-going effort for a native Cocoa  
client for Bazaar. It seems somewhat stale at the moment, but it may  
be worth contacting the owner to see if he or she may be interested in  
collaborating in bzr-explorer.

https://launchpad.net/bazaarx

On Jul 4, 2009, at 02:34, Alexander Belchenko wrote:

> Jean-Francois Roy пишет:
>> Lars,
>>
>> I would still encourage you strongly to build a native interface.
>> Getting bzr-explored working on Mac OS X is not trivial because of  
>> all
>> the dependencies, and once running it clearly doesn't feel like a  
>> native
>> application. I have the utmost respect for bzr-explorer, I think it's
>> fantastic, but it is not a native, designed for Mac OS X  
>> application. A
>> lot of non-technical users will get turned off by that.
>>
>> Hopefully, building a OS X client should not be too difficult
>> technically. In fact, the application could be written in Python  
>> using
>> PyObjC to interact directly with bzrlib.
>
> I have no experience with Mac but on Windows Qt-based interface  
> looks as native application.
> I suspect its because Qt reuse as much as possible of existing GUI  
> libs there.

Part of the problem is in the appearance of the application (for  
example, bzr-explorer on Mac OS X running under Qt doesn't have a  
native toolbar, it has some custom replacement which doesn't look nor  
behave like a native toolbar), and part of the problem is in the  
behavior and design (which is a much bigger problem as far as  
usability goes).

>
> I should say that efforts needed to write native client is sometimes  
> very high, so it's more
> productive to just re-use cross-platform solution. Because it means  
> more developers working on
> universal thing rather than on platform-specific thing.
>
> From other POV there is menu definition available as XML/INI files,  
> and it can be reused when
> building natival app. May be it's even possible to write universal  
> core model independent of
> specific GUI toolkit and reuse it between various clients. AFAIUI  
> one of Ian's goals is to have some
> basic model of Bazaar GUI and to reuse it another clients (bzr- 
> eclipse, Visual Studio, other IDEs)
> as much as possible.

This is most definitely possible. That shared core model could easily  
be used by multiple applications, if well designed. it would also be  
beneficial to bzr-explorer in and of itself, because it would allow  
more freedom to refactor or redesign the interface without altering  
the core functionality. In other words, it would fit the MVC pattern,  
which has proven successful for desktop applications.

>
>>
>> Just my modest opinion :p
>>
>> Sent from my iPhone
>>
>> On 2009-07-03, at 1:57, "Lars Hoss" <lars at woeye.net> wrote:
>>
>>>> Lars,
>>>>
>>>> I can't offer to help code, but I can offer to try things out,  
>>>> both Mac
>>>> OS X and Ubuntu.
>>>
>>> Thanks, good to know!
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>