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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 20-06-2013 22:02, Aldcroft, Thomas
wrote:<br>
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<div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 3:20 PM,
Adrian Price-Whelan <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:adrianmpw@gmail.com"
target="_blank">adrianmpw@gmail.com</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I'm
totally lost on what thread I'm responding to, but +100 to
what<br>
Perry said about GUIs! IMHO there is plenty to keep us
busy working on<br>
the modeling and backend, and we should focus our efforts
on making<br>
that code super slick and useable *first*, then worry
about a GUI<br>
(which, also IMO, are overrated! why do you want to click
on your<br>
absorption lines anyways??).<br>
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<div>I understand you are being a bit sarcastic, but I did
half my thesis on QSO absorption lines and I'll tell you
that being able to click on those lines was a lifesaver.
I wrote a Fortran / PGPLOT-driven GUI tool for analyzing
absorption lines which people were still using 10 years
later. Suffice to say that GUI's are useful, but I fully
agree with comments regarding the separation of
computation from interface.</div>
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<div>- Tom</div>
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<br>
Interesting - I did my Master's Thesis on QSO absorption lines, and
used a fortran/pgplot based GUI for my modeling. VPfit, to be
precise.<br>
That is also when I learned what a difference a good GUI can make:
Joe Liske's VPguess interface to vpfit was a life saver for me.
Would your work have happened to be on any of those two tools?<br>
<br>
It bears repeating again, of course, that any good GUI is
characterized by the fact that any important setting an be saved and
preferably manually edited in a configuration file and loaded at a
later point. <br>
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On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 3:09 PM, Perry Greenfield <<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:stsci.perry@gmail.com">stsci.perry@gmail.com</a>>
wrote:<br>
><br>
> On Jun 20, 2013, at 12:34 PM, Erik Tollerud
wrote:<br>
><br>
>> I'm of mixed minds about traits UI because
once you know it you can make great GUIs with it, but
I've spent a lot of time troubleshooting people's
python installations to get traits to work. That is,
in general it can be tricky to get installed because
of all the dependencies. Maybe this has improved
recently with Enthought's Canopy (or other new python
distros), but that's been my past experience.<br>
>><br>
>> More generally, the view in the astropy core
package is that we don't want to put GUIs in the core
because GUIs always carry lots of dependencies, which
we don't want to be forced to deal with. But part of
the whole reason for affiliated packages was to get
around this, so we're happy to see GUI-based
affiliated packages.<br>
><br>
> To expand on the GUI issue a bit. I certainly see
the benefit of an interactive GUI for these tools. But
they raise a number of issues that the authors should
think about.<br>
><br>
> 1) They require one to select a windowing system.
It would be nice if we standardized on one. Two
obvious (but not the only) candidates are Qt and
Tkinter. Qt is much more modern, but as far as I can
see still presents significant installation issues for
some. Tkinter is long in the tooth, but installation
issues are generally much fewer. Yes, there's Wx, Gtk,
and others, not to mention the whole browser interface
issue, which ought to be considered as well.<br>
><br>
> 2) I've seen the danger of someone starting right
off with a GUI framework for their spectral (or any
other kind of tool), and making their computational
functionality entirely intertwined with it. I think
that is a mistake. Eventually, many would like to
script a lot of that functionality, or use it in other
contexts. It's really important to keep the core
computational stuff independent of the GUI.<br>
><br>
> 3) GUI's are expensive to do well, and expensive
to make changes to. For that reason I tend to favor
the no-GUI approach for the initial functionality as
much as possible, and limit the interactions to
simpler tools (or simple GUI) until all the pieces are
ready for integration into a full GUI interface. It
helps accomplish 2) as well, and gives some experience
before too much is invested in a GUI design.<br>
><br>
> So even if a GUI is needed, it's quite likely a
lot of the underlying machinery should go into the
core, or at least into a non-GUI package.<br>
><br>
> Perry<br>
><br>
> _______________________________________________<br>
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<br>
<br>
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<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">--<br>
Adrian M. Price-Whelan ~ Columbia University ~ <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://adrian.pw"
target="_blank">http://adrian.pw</a><br>
</font></span>
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