I think you missed looking at several GUI builders. I have not used a
GUI builder in 5 years that had you nail down positions.
Swing(for Java), GTK, Qt, and wxWidgets(to a lesser degree) all use a
sizer metaphore. You lay out he sizers and put your widgets in
various sizer layouts. This means that the scaling you speak of
above, just works for you. Accordingly GUI builders for these
toolkits work within that model(look at Glade for GTK and wxGlade for
wxWidgets).
I think you need to step out of the age of Motif and MFCs and look at
what modern toolkits and GUI designers have to offer before you start
in on a rant.
-Chris
On 6/5/05, Mike Meyer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Thomas Bartkus [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Paul Rubin http://[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote in message
Are we talking about a drag-and-drop GUI builder?
I am!
[...]
I happen to be one - and I *know* I'm not alone - who thinks that building
user interfaces is way too difficult and way too important. It is
particularly frustrating in that we do seem to be moving backwards in this
department.
What GUI builder should I use, or similar, is a common question on
c.l.python. I'm a curmudgeon, and don't like GUI builders - so I avoid
them. While normally that wouldn't cause me to encourage others to
avoid GUI builders, I think they have a worse problem: they encourage
the delivery of applications without flexible, robust user
interfaces. In short, the help produce inferior applications. While
this isn't strictly a python issue, c.l.python is where I run into it
- so I'm bringing it up here.
Now, I'm not an expert on GUIs, GUI toolkits, or GUI builders. I've
used some of each, and draw my conclusions from that admittedly small
sampling. Possibly there are other samples that don't have the
problems I describe. Part of the point of posting this is to expose
these thoughts to others, and find out what I've overlooked. I'll
return to these points where appropriate.
What the user deserves.
I'm going to take a side trip into what constitutes a robust, flexible
user interface - which is what I believe the user deserves. Please
bear with me. By robust, I mean the user interface should adopt to the
environment it's being run in. Windows that don't fit on the screen
are simply unacceptable - but all to common if you use a very small
screen resolution. By flexible, I man the user should be able to
adjust the UI to suit their viewing conditions - the DPI on the
screen, the viewing distance, and their possibly aging eyesight.
I use two systems with graphical interfaces, and both are a bit out of
the ordinary. You might even call them extreme. One is a 1600x1200
desktop on a 21 monitor viewed from about 18 away. The other is a
640x480 desktop on a 53 monitor viewed from about 10' away. Even
those these are on opposite sides of normal users systems, they both
suffer from the same problem - out of the box applications have UI
elements that are unreadably small.
The obvious solution would be for the system to detect all these
environmental factors, and scale the applications
accordingly. However, things like viewing distance and the quality of
my eyesight are hard to detect automatically, and it would be a pain
to have to enter all those things manually. Since the end result of
all these is a single factor - a UI scale factor - a system wide knob
to scale applications would seem to be the solution.
Note that this is *not* an easy thing to do. Anyone who's tried
scaling bit-mapped fonts will tell you you can't simply scale something
and expect it to look good. Scalable fonts have hints and other
goodies in them so they look good as you scale the fonts up/down. This
may be why, but most windowing systems don't seem to do provide a
global UI scale knob. X certainly doesn't. Windows has a limited
capability to scale fonts system-wide, but it doesn't work very
well. OSX seems to have a system-wide display DPI setting one can play
with, but it's not clear how well that works. NeWS and NeXT could
probably do this, but would seem to have a negligible to nonexistent
user bases. rio seems capable, but the typical rio UI is ugly even by
my admittedly low standards.
Failing the single system-wide knob, a flexible application should
have allow the user to scale the application with a single knob. This
is hard to do with modern GUI toolkits. I do it by using text for
imagery in the UI, and having a scaling factor that is applied to the
font sizes. While I prefer text to graphics for UI elements, that's a
rant for a different time. I'll concede that such an interface is
probably unacceptable on a modern commercial application - users now
expect graphics. But how many GUI toolkits let you use a scalable
graphics format (SVG, PS, etc) for images in the UI? My predilections
have kept me from looking closely, but I certainly don't recall seeing
any in the GUI toolkits I've looked at.
I claim
