GUI Designers
etfb has been playing with open source GUI development tools lately, mostly giving up with cries of disgust.
I have to agree with him: Visual Basic came out in 1991, Delphi in 1995. IMHO, Delphi is still head and shoulders above anything else out there for visually designing a form and then linking it to code, but VB perfectly usable, and Visual C# is a serious contender.
Windows has a heap of quite good desktop application builders, many of them available for free download.
WTF does Linux/OOS have nothing to compete?
Mono and Lazarus are quite flawed.
Netbeans does have a reasonable workable screen designer, but it too is known to be flawed, especially when you start trying to do anything complicated. A bug I've noticed with all versions is that changes to the form design are not always picked up when you run the code, you have to clean + build to be sure your last modification has been included.
Another is that the rather clever layout system will sometimes go critical and mess up completely, and you better hope you have your form backed up.
But the main problem with the netbeans/matisse form designer is that Netbeans keeps trying to hide it. It's still there in the latest versions, but not easy to find, and the version on the ubuntu repository does not appear to contain all the needed files for the form designer to work.
The top contender actually appears to be Glade + GTK + Python.
Glade allows you to build a screen for GTK and save it as an xml file.
The Python gtk library allows you to load this form and provides relatively simple access to controlling it, and Python is quite a powerful language in its own right. It's also a relatively portable solution, as it will run on most systems out there.
Getting started is not intuitive, but it does work.
Ubuntu has provided a moderately useful development tool:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly
This a) makes sure all the assorted tools are available and b) wraps the creation process and builds some templates to get you started "quickly".
I have't had an extended play, but it does appear to be a step in the right direction.
Having said that, how hard is it to:
* Create a form
* Drop objects onto a form and change properties
* Create an event handler in an underlying language and be able to flick to that event manager by double-clicking on the event in the form designer.
This last is where Glade doesn't quite measure up. I can see why they want to keep it language independant, but all they would need to do is add in a hook to allow language designers to intercept a 'go to event source' button, and this would go from being "useful" to "awesome"
One day I may have to break down and implement something along these lines, but it won't be today.
I have to agree with him: Visual Basic came out in 1991, Delphi in 1995. IMHO, Delphi is still head and shoulders above anything else out there for visually designing a form and then linking it to code, but VB perfectly usable, and Visual C# is a serious contender.
Windows has a heap of quite good desktop application builders, many of them available for free download.
WTF does Linux/OOS have nothing to compete?
Mono and Lazarus are quite flawed.
Netbeans does have a reasonable workable screen designer, but it too is known to be flawed, especially when you start trying to do anything complicated. A bug I've noticed with all versions is that changes to the form design are not always picked up when you run the code, you have to clean + build to be sure your last modification has been included.
Another is that the rather clever layout system will sometimes go critical and mess up completely, and you better hope you have your form backed up.
But the main problem with the netbeans/matisse form designer is that Netbeans keeps trying to hide it. It's still there in the latest versions, but not easy to find, and the version on the ubuntu repository does not appear to contain all the needed files for the form designer to work.
The top contender actually appears to be Glade + GTK + Python.
Glade allows you to build a screen for GTK and save it as an xml file.
The Python gtk library allows you to load this form and provides relatively simple access to controlling it, and Python is quite a powerful language in its own right. It's also a relatively portable solution, as it will run on most systems out there.
Getting started is not intuitive, but it does work.
Ubuntu has provided a moderately useful development tool:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Quickly
This a) makes sure all the assorted tools are available and b) wraps the creation process and builds some templates to get you started "quickly".
I have't had an extended play, but it does appear to be a step in the right direction.
Having said that, how hard is it to:
* Create a form
* Drop objects onto a form and change properties
* Create an event handler in an underlying language and be able to flick to that event manager by double-clicking on the event in the form designer.
This last is where Glade doesn't quite measure up. I can see why they want to keep it language independant, but all they would need to do is add in a hook to allow language designers to intercept a 'go to event source' button, and this would go from being "useful" to "awesome"
One day I may have to break down and implement something along these lines, but it won't be today.