Well, I can voice another reason to prefer GUIs that use the OS's native API:
With recent versions of Gnome, it is possible to set a window to be always on top of or always below others.
The very cool thing here is that if I then run Photoshop with Wine in Ubuntu, the program becomes easier to deal with than before since I can have one document always on top of all the others. (If I'm using it to grab stuff from and would otherwise need to keep recovering it after it's fallen behind all the other windows).
So... please, at least do real windows!
Another thing I might add is that, in most cases, introducing the user to any more key presses than there already are can easily scare them off.
Same with small buttons (who here has tried to teach themselves Truespace without a guide?) and, in some cases, new gadgets.
Windows's GUI is a bit lacking at the higher level, and lots of those other features that we see in MS Office and the like are a bit obscure and not very common in GUI libraries.
However, its simplicity really isn't a bad thing: The GUI is built around accessibility.
When a program uses the Windows GUI, people who rely on hotkeys can trust these that they can control it to a reasonable extent without a mouse.
More realistically, someone who needs bigger text can get that bigger text. I would be surprised if I saw a single custom GUI which made note of the OS's text size, colour and font options.
Then there's voice recognition... Vista has a really excellent speech recognition system, handy for presentations by weirdos and disabled people. (Consequences of not using the OS's own GUI for this are obvious - the program misses out on a lot of fun. For instance, a nuclear reactor simulator can get pretty intense once there's voice command going on!).
Of course, for map editors the like, it may be the best solution. (Games, of course, should obviously barely ever use the native GUI)
Just head my warnings if anyone plans to use a non-native UI for a program whose users have the slightest chance of using any of the above features.
With recent versions of Gnome, it is possible to set a window to be always on top of or always below others.
The very cool thing here is that if I then run Photoshop with Wine in Ubuntu, the program becomes easier to deal with than before since I can have one document always on top of all the others. (If I'm using it to grab stuff from and would otherwise need to keep recovering it after it's fallen behind all the other windows).
So... please, at least do real windows!
Another thing I might add is that, in most cases, introducing the user to any more key presses than there already are can easily scare them off.
Same with small buttons (who here has tried to teach themselves Truespace without a guide?) and, in some cases, new gadgets.
Windows's GUI is a bit lacking at the higher level, and lots of those other features that we see in MS Office and the like are a bit obscure and not very common in GUI libraries.
However, its simplicity really isn't a bad thing: The GUI is built around accessibility.
When a program uses the Windows GUI, people who rely on hotkeys can trust these that they can control it to a reasonable extent without a mouse.
More realistically, someone who needs bigger text can get that bigger text. I would be surprised if I saw a single custom GUI which made note of the OS's text size, colour and font options.
Then there's voice recognition... Vista has a really excellent speech recognition system, handy for presentations by weirdos and disabled people. (Consequences of not using the OS's own GUI for this are obvious - the program misses out on a lot of fun. For instance, a nuclear reactor simulator can get pretty intense once there's voice command going on!).
Of course, for map editors the like, it may be the best solution. (Games, of course, should obviously barely ever use the native GUI)
Just head my warnings if anyone plans to use a non-native UI for a program whose users have the slightest chance of using any of the above features.