| I was considering that approach (using native OS widgets) on initial stages of my Sciter (http://sciter.com) development. It didn't went through for the simple reason: set of common widgets in GUI OSes is quite small: buttons, editboxes, selects and that is it. What about menus, toolbars, treeviews/virtual lists, etc. etc. ? So yes, you can do with that common set something extremely simple like alert() or prompt() in browsers. But nothing close to full scale applications. Yet graphic primitives... GDI on Windows does not know anything about alpha channel or anti-aliasing... But CoreGraphics does. What would be the common set in this case? Again, idea of reusing OS widgets and native platform's look and feel in multiplatform GUI toolkits is a perpetual dream of programmers since initial version of Bible was written. wxWidgets or SWT are such examples. But event they failed to achieve one of their primary goal - native platform's look and feel. Does anyone know any wxWidget or SWT application that look native on, say, OSX ? So if you are designing application of "one red button 'Start'" then this approach will work of course. But even in that case ... how to create really red button in OSX? Or on Windows? You will want something custom drawn... but you haven't common graphic primitives and so on. |