Why talk about a music app that a small amount of people use while we can talk about the most popular pro music apps out there. The kind of apps that the whole music industry is based on. Cubase , Ableton Live, Logic and Reason.

Guess what .... they all have custom GUIs

http://rekkerd.org/img/201404/prop_reason71.jpg http://www.highprofileaudio.com/LogicPro_BIG1.jpg http://static.kvraudio.com/i/b/cubase5.jpg http://soundista.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Ableton.png

When it comes to music and graphics, there is not even a contest. Custom GUI win hearts of the users. Same story with mobile apps and web apps.

As matter of fact even some of the apps that do use Native GUIs they reject the native look using their own custom look at least to an extend.

And the native look goes more and more towards popular custom guis we see in web apps, like flat design etc etc.

None of them uses its own Window system.

actually all of them do use their own Window system and far more than that.

Hmm, I just started Logic on my computer and it uses native windows and lots of native UI. There is a main window, preferences window, help window, keyboard window, colors window, metronom settings, ... there is a menu bar with ten menus - native. There are native open/save dialogs, ...

None of that is in Pharo. It uses a clunky font, clunky windows, clunky shadows on windows, clunky resizing of the main window, its own open/save dialogs, its own finder, ...

Looks dated to me...

I have not been using Logic that much, but I can assure you Ableto and Reason are custom drawn GUI all the way and so are the vast majority of VST instruments and effects.

Fonts that comes with Pharo by default is a bitmap font, you can replace it with any TrueType font in Pharo settings.

You can have setting windows, open/save dialogs, color windows and much more with Pharo's GUI. There is even a window manager that can help you manage multiple windows. Tab support , and much more.

If you hate Pharo GUI so much , dont use Pharo, nobody forces you to. None in the Pharo community has a problem improving the GUI (the GUI is actually improved in every release of Pharo) or even supporting native GUIs ( https://marsonpharo.wordpress.com/ ) but the community is very small and I think they are doing a great job for their size.

Personally I really like the GUI :)

> You can have setting windows, open/save dialogs, color windows and much more with Pharo's GUI.

That's not the point. It is just not used by the software itself.

> Personally I really like the GUI :)

I like the GUI of my Lisp Machine. But very very few people use it and it is behind the times in many ways.

> If you hate Pharo GUI so much

Pointing out that it is dated and clunky is not 'hating' it. If somebody asks me how a UI for development tool should look like, I would point out the importance of a native look and feel. Lighttable for example. A recent development. It's not really native. It uses complex web stuff on the desktop. Fail.

True, cross-platform development is tough. But it's somewhat possible. Example: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/