[KDE/Mac] OS X observations

[Jaroslaw Staniek]

On 3 January 2015 at 11:15, René J.V. <rjvbertin at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Saturday January 03 2015 10:53:39 Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>
>>Just for the record, according to plans, we think about Kexi on Mac as
>>a native, regular, shiny, standalone mac app. Let's see what's this
>>interesting year brings.
>
> Then why isn't it included in the OS X product set?

Because Kexi on Windows and Mac had no maintainers (maintainer, not
packagers) so has been frozen. Then we knew it's better to do the
Qt5/KF5 port first. This is a complex app that manages your data, many
things have to be tested :)

>  And if you say native, does that mean it'll accept documents dragged onto its icon or served to it via Launch Services (as in opening an associated document type in the Finder) just as it would on Linux? Ditto for objects dropped onto its window?
>

Yes, yes.

Given there're enough of Mac fans that want to builld cool apps with
Kexi (using Javascript) I think we can own the niche where MS Access
refuses to be (not available on Mac). And show how dated Filemaker is
in some aspects.

> Qt applications can indeed do that on OS X, but it's my understanding that they have to declare the proper principal class (one provided through Qt) in their Info.plist, which is not done by the current KDE build system, and I don't think kdelibs has the required glue either.
>
> It's been on my list to look into this, but that never got high priority, partly because I fear I'd have to do it all over again for KF5, partly because I rarely miss the feature in the applications I use (and the way I use them).

PS: The fact that Kexi (by design) uses no traditinal documents and
related workflow only helps; it's largely a Qt-only app, XMLGUI issues
disappeared in version 2 when Kexi stopped to use it. On Mac we'll
want to rethink the menu to avoid associations with Windows-like look
& feel. It's not black-white decision though, various apps such as
Lightroom use extra menus too and sidebars, mac menu is there but also
the extra menu switches global view modes (Develop, Slideshow....):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=TO0UXwZIW_E#t=33

-- 
regards, Jaroslaw Staniek

KDE:
: A world-wide network of software engineers, artists, writers, translators
: and facilitators committed to Free Software development - http://kde.org
Calligra Suite:
: A graphic art and office suite - http://calligra.org
Kexi:
: A visual database apps builder - http://calligra.org/kexi
Qt Certified Specialist:
: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek