6.1 GUI Construction
Chapter 4 covered this topic in detail, but
it's worth reviewing. Generically, for maximum
cross-platform compatibility, stick with the
Metal look and feel, and perform
sanity checking to ensure that the user interface operates correctly
on both platforms. For the best performance (and user experience) on
Mac OS X, however, be sure to let users run the application with the
Aqua look and feel. Doing so
involves using appropriate fonts and spacing so that Metal and Aqua
interfaces look good on every platform.
While Apple's Aqua GUI is excellent and the
implementation allows first-class application appearances, the same
cannot be said for the standard
Windows look and
feel. Determining whether you want to support one or more native look
and feel targets is largely a matter of budget and resources (mostly
consumed by the testing personnel). Whatever you decide, though, you
need to test your GUI applications on every platform they will run
on. This might mean buying some extra hardware (or better yet,
salvaging those old 486 and Pentium II machines), installing Windows
and Linux, and actually seeing what your application looks like on
each platform. Despite the best advice from this book, things can go
wrong when running an application on a platform it
wasn't designed for or developed on. Your own eyes
are always the best verification.
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