Platform UI Differences

Contributors

• Mox Soini: Mox

Introduction and History

This page is still a stub. Will fill later

Complementary and Related projects

The possible future UI Layout work is complementary and not overlapping with:

• UI Layout
• Graphics Rendering re-work: OOo Canvas
• UNO Runtime environment
• ODF Toolkit and
• OOo Runner Separate Apps on Mac OS X

Goals

Document the differences in Platform specific UIs (e.g. Aqua/Mac OS X, Aero/Vista, Gnome/Linux, KDE/Linux Win32/Windows XP).

The focus is in stuff expressed in GUI guidelines (e.g. Aqua HIG, Aero xxx, Gnome UI SG,...) and stuff that is standard or preferred way of doing things, as exemplified by high quality applications on each platform (e.g. Apple Pages (iWork) on Mac OS X, MS Word (Vista Office), Abiword on Gnome)

Differences

The following lists the typical applications used on various platforms and the comparison screenshots from OpenOffice.org. The aim is to show that while there are similarities in these platform-specific applications, and much of the actual functionality is quite similar, the actual UI (i.e. how you accomplish those functions) has differences both on surface and in deeper levels.

Stuff to add (Mac OS X):

• no icons in the system-wide menu (application menu)
• ok/cancel buttons: ok on the right side
• "preferences" on the Apple menu, not elsewhere
• no highlight (i.e no visual change) on mouse-over in toolbar
• no 3D-effect on (main) toolbar (= no borders in buttons)
• ...

Platform specific UI differences

	Mac OS X (Aqua)	Windows Vista (Aero)	Gnome Linux
Application Menu
Location Where the menu is located	System wide menu in the top of the screen. Contents of the menu depend on which is the active window	In the top of the application window	In the top of the application window
Icons	No icons in the menu	No icons in the menu	typically(?) icons in the menu
Preferences Where the settings are located and what they are called	Preferences... in the Apple -menu (system wide menu item), accessible with CMD-,	Options in Tools -menu??	Preferences... in Edit -menu
Shaping text strings to glyphs	ATSUI not fully implemented	ATSUI via Pango a pango shaping engine	ATSUI?
Rendering Glyphs to screen/print	ATSUI not fully implemented	ATSUI via Cairo cairo_show_glyphs	ATSUI?
Metrics font analysis and information, also font substitution	??	ATS via Pango, font substitution not implemented	??
Main Loop integration