[kilon]

its not, but on the other hand, existing GUI APIs are not live coding friendly nor made in Pharo ;) Also the moment you want to change something or hack something , welcome to C++ hell. You sacrifice native look and powerful features, you get a live easy to hack system in return. But as I said Pharo DOES NOT forbid you from using Native libraries of any sort, including GUI. The fact that the vast majority of pharo developers choose not to use native gui apis, says a lot about how desirable GUI APIs are compared to "non native look" Pharo GUI API which is called Morphic :)

[lispm]

Compare with for example this Lisp application:

http://opusmodus.com/user-interface.html

A new UI, but using tons of native elements...

[kilon]

Why talk about a music app that a small amount of people use while we can talk about the most popular pro music apps out there. The kind of apps that the whole music industry is based on. Cubase , Ableton Live, Logic and Reason.

Guess what .... they all have custom GUIs

http://rekkerd.org/img/201404/prop_reason71.jpg http://www.highprofileaudio.com/LogicPro_BIG1.jpg http://static.kvraudio.com/i/b/cubase5.jpg http://soundista.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ableton.png

When it comes to music and graphics, there is not even a contest. Custom GUI win hearts of the users. Same story with mobile apps and web apps.

As matter of fact even some of the apps that do use Native GUIs they reject the native look using their own custom look at least to an extend.

And the native look goes more and more towards popular custom guis we see in web apps, like flat design etc etc.

[lispm]

None of them uses its own Window system.

[kilon]

actually all of them do use their own Window system and far more than that.

[lispm]

Hmm, I just started Logic on my computer and it uses native windows and lots of native UI. There is a main window, preferences window, help window, keyboard window, colors window, metronom settings, ... there is a menu bar with ten menus - native. There are native open/save dialogs, ...

None of that is in Pharo. It uses a clunky font, clunky windows, clunky shadows on windows, clunky resizing of the main window, its own open/save dialogs, its own finder, ...

Looks dated to me...

[kilon]

I have not been using Logic that much, but I can assure you Ableto and Reason are custom drawn GUI all the way and so are the vast majority of VST instruments and effects.

Fonts that comes with Pharo by default is a bitmap font, you can replace it with any TrueType font in Pharo settings.

You can have setting windows, open/save dialogs, color windows and much more with Pharo's GUI. There is even a window manager that can help you manage multiple windows. Tab support , and much more.

If you hate Pharo GUI so much , dont use Pharo, nobody forces you to. None in the Pharo community has a problem improving the GUI (the GUI is actually improved in every release of Pharo) or even supporting native GUIs ( https://marsonpharo.wordpress.com/ ) but the community is very small and I think they are doing a great job for their size.

Personally I really like the GUI :)