Celestia Forums

Just a question out of curiosity ...

Does anyone know why Celestia is not 100% cross-platform, instead of only it's core being cross-platform? Is there still no decent cross-platform UI API available? Or is it because of licensing?

-Don G.

Don,

It's a philosophical issue which has been discussed several times, although the threads are hard to find.

One either designs a program to look the same on all platforms or one designs a program to match the GUI standards on each of them.

The first path means you can continue use the program easily even when you have to move from one type of computer to another. The second makes the program easy to use by a person who's always worked on a particular type of computer platform but who is new to this particular program.

Celestia is following the second route, although it's a lot more work. That way people familiar with a particular type of user interface (whether Windows, MacOS or Linux/KDE) can start using it right away without having to puzzle out all the things that are different from what they're used to.

Howdy Selden,

Thanks for your reply. Makes perfect sense. I have been out of software development for some time and have not kept abrest of the many philosophical issues.

I was asking since as Celestia gets bigger and bigger, it's going to take much more time and several "OS and UI specific" people to maintain specific dis-connected parts of it -- instead of having just plain old "C++ programmers" being able to maintain any part of it. But I certainly agree about having Celestia be "easy to use" on each and every OS/UI combination it runs on.

-Don G.