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Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Is it time to make Wireshark a native Mac OS X application?

From: Stephen Fisher <steve@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:37:52 -0600

On Sep 20, 2009, at 1:09 PM, Joerg Mayer wrote:

An in my opinion, the different GUIs don't have to do all the same things: It's called competition and hopefully will make all existing guis better.

I agree that different cross-platform GUI toolkits could be advantageous, though we would have to be careful to not severely limit the user's experience in the case of having an unfinished port.

In the case of the hypothetical native Mac OS X port, it would have to look and act a bit differently to adhere to Apple's Human Interface Guidelines...

http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/XHIGIntro.html#/ /apple_ref/doc/uid/TP30000894-TP6

... not to mention what Mac users expect.

One thing I'd like to see is just a single executable that loads the
approproate gui plugin instead of the other way round (gui loading libwireshark as a library). An example application that does something like that was centericq and probably its successor centerim (http:// www.centerim.org).

Interesting idea. Could you elaborate on the advantages of doing that? I glanced at CeterIM's web page, but it wasn't readily apparent what the advantages are.


Steve