To my mind there are fundamentally two ends of the cross-platform-GUI spectrum:
1) Photoshop-designed glamor GUIs that look exactly as the designer intended pixel-by-pixel from the .PSD files. DVD menus, tacky driver installers, videogame menus, etc.
2) Natively-laid-out guis that use the native tools of the platform and will look wildly different from platform to platform or even screen to screen but still offer fundamentally the same experience.
I strongly prefer kits that follow "2", where if somebody says "can I move this button over a few pixels" the kit says "no, also you suck for even wanting that". In those cases, the kit would strongly attempt to map the developer's intent into the concepts native to the platform, but not the developer's exact layout.
But for people who want or need things at the (1) end of the spectrum, an OpenGL-based toolkit makes perfect sense to me. But it does mean that the toolkit is taking on the responsibility of implementing all the accessibility features that would come out-of-the-box with a more native kit.
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To my mind there are fundamentally two ends of the cross-platform-GUI spectrum:
1) Photoshop-designed glamor GUIs that look exactly as the designer intended pixel-by-pixel from the .PSD files. DVD menus, tacky driver installers, videogame menus, etc.
2) Natively-laid-out guis that use the native tools of the platform and will look wildly different from platform to platform or even screen to screen but still offer fundamentally the same experience.
I strongly prefer kits that follow "2", where if somebody says "can I move this button over a few pixels" the kit says "no, also you suck for even wanting that". In those cases, the kit would strongly attempt to map the developer's intent into the concepts native to the platform, but not the developer's exact layout.
But for people who want or need things at the (1) end of the spectrum, an OpenGL-based toolkit makes perfect sense to me. But it does mean that the toolkit is taking on the responsibility of implementing all the accessibility features that would come out-of-the-box with a more native kit.