Motif is the industry standard ToolKit available on more than 200 hardware and software platforms. It is the de facto graphical user interface on UNIX systems in heterogeneous networked computing environments. Motif is also the base graphical user interface for the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) and a number of other desktops. The new version includes the following changes: Ten new widgets have been added to the Open Motif toolkit. These widgets expand Motif’s capabilities in areas such as geometry management, resource specification, and user interaction. User-defined “ToolTips” have been added to all widgets that are a subclass of XmPrimitive. Any widget that is a child of a VendorShell gains this functionality.
OpenMotif 2.2.0 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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With all the GTK and QT toolkit for X applications, Motif looks rather outdated to me…
Anyone want to comment??
meh
yuck
Motif sucks…
I have always struggled with motif, CDE mostly. When they do focus-by-mouse instead of via a click or tab-key is particularly fustrating. also the colour schemes are generally by default too dark to work with and the fonts bad. But that is impressions of various CDE etc configurations I’ve had the misfortune to play with. Motif can look good, can be used to good effect, I just haven’t seen such…
Motif can look good? Proof is needed for this!
Motif is a TOOLKIT. CDE was created USING motif. Focus policies are set by the desktop enviorment not by the toolkit. Your problem is with the configuration (or lack there of) of CDE, not motif.
And yes, CDE does blow goats.
Motif has got to be the ugliest toolkit I’ve ever seen. I wish somebody would put it out of its misery.
And the openmotif people want my personal information to download it? The openmotif people can go f**k themselves
I like OpenWin.
The only reason to download openmotif nowadays seems to be for compatibility
purposes, some applications require it. I do like the programming model but
the looks are.. well, pretty boring.
I’ve been using Qt for a number of years now. Qt so far is the best GUI library out there. Quick to learn, runs fast, and easy to program. I have tried others for X Window System and none comes close.
Does Motif 2.2 support internationalization, right-to-left text drawing for Arabic, for example? Does it support themes? And it’s probably not crossform like Qt. Qt also does embed for small devices.
> And it’s probably not crossform like Qt.
And Qt only costs $1,550 per platform and developer, such a sweet deal.
> Qt also does embed for small devices.
Yep, quite fantastic, at the low low price of $2,325 per developer, one sure can’t beat trolltech.
Oh, well, motif does have some of the features of the grand fantastic Qt though, it does support internationalization actually, in fact in a far more comprehensive and mature way than Qt, but trolltech sure makes up for that with their pricing policy, and motif supports right-to-left and up-to-down as well actually, but hey, cant beat that price, and you get one whole developer per payment too.
And it does not end there, the motif developers have also instead of fixing all the above mentioned problems seen to having such meaningless things as a sane language interface with C bindings which allows silly things like bindings from largely any modern language instead of going the obviously superior Qt route and not only picking a language with a interface not supported by most languages but also changing that language around to make sure no one can do anything with it by use of a preprocessor. Motif also looses point on being a widely accepted industry standard with comprehensive documentation and lots of competence in its use, it is even the Unix toolkit standard decided by the major unix vendors of today, no way it can compete with a toolkit that changes the rules of everything every year to make sure to maintain confusion.
</really_heavy_sarcasm>
Motif is not exactly great, but as it happens all other toolkits suck equally much so in the end. Qt does cost quite a lot of money for non-free programs, and it is not only C++ only, it is not even C++ but a bastardised variation. Gtk+ is C but they promise to break the API both source and binary in 2.0, wouldnt be so bad if it werent for the fact that they will do the same thing again in 3.0 they have already promised, a toolkit needs a certain amount of backwards compatibility, people cant run around and update everything always and you probably cant expect people to maintain the few dozen slightly incompatible gtk versions we will have in the end. Not that motif is a solution, it just isnt any worse.
If you’re developing commercial software, $1,550 is very cheap. That’s less than a week of salary for one developer. However, if you’re developing free software, you don’t have to pay anything.
If Motif is so good then why isn’t KDE based on it but Qt? I remember Motif appeared on slashdot.org once, and many people believe that Motif is a dead technology. As you see, KDE is running on most Linux, FreeBSD, even Windows as desktop.
Remember that when your app is Qt-based it will run on Windows, OSX, Unix, etc… On the other hand, if you app is Motif based, you’re stuck with X.
Slashdot geeks pronounced Motif as a dead technology because they can’t get the latest mp3 player, or the latest file manager…. —- but since linux for the desktop market is pretty much dead in the water right now, it just highlight the fact that linux startups would burn through millions of dollars with nothing to show for except for a souped up file manager (i.e. Eazel’s Nautilus).
Meanwhile where is IBM putting their billion dollar on linux development — running linux on mainframes, big servers, etc… Samething for HP’s linux developments. And their customers want the old and trusty motif/CDE.