[Tutor] Choice of GUI builders

[Alan Gauld]

"Marc Tompkins" <marc.tompkins at gmail.com> wrote

> on, and its idiom felt more comfortable to me than the others. 
> Also, unlike
> Qt, it's free... I hate to be a cheapskate, but I'm a very small 
> business
> and I need to put food on my family, so the Qt license is a major 
> hurdle.

Umm, so do the folks at TrollTech :-)

But I believe there are Free versions available for non-commercial use 
now.
But if you are putting food on your table then you also need to put
some on TrollTech's...

> I have to say, though, that as a recovering Visual Studio user there 
> is one
> thing - believe me, it's the only thing! - I miss, and that's an
> honest-to-goodness WYSIWYG GUI designer.

The Visual Studio one is not bad but it's taken Microsoft 15 years of
continuous development to get there. The early Visual C++ GUI Builder
(or Resource editor as it was then) was not much better than Glade.
It wasn't till VC v6 (after 7 years?) that they managed a decent GUI 
builder
and it was still poor at handling resize events etc.

And of course it only works for Windows...

If it takes MS that long charging money for the work its not that
surprising that OpenSource is taking longer to produce a good
product that works for all platforms..

> Why can't you just draw your GUI on the screen and concentrate on
> the actual functionality in peace?

Coz its hard! Especially taking into the platform variations and
the tricks needed to handle resizing etc. It requires a lot of
introspection of the widgets and dynamic drawing of the GUI.
Remember its not just gif files that you are placing on the designer
its real widgets on a real UI...

> In the wx world, I tried both PythonCard and wxGlade.

I agree with you about both...

> It's not really that hard, by the way.  Draw yourself a picture 
> ahead of
> time - on paper, or (as I do) with hyphens and pipe characters in 
> the
> comments - so you can keep straight which sizers go inside of which. 
> Then,
> build from the inside out.  And when you get weary - and oh, you 
> will get
> weary - indulge in just a little nostalgie de la bue.

And this. I use Delphi for all my heavy duty UI work and call a Python
server for the heavy processing. Thankfully I don;t do much heavy UI 
work!

Alan G.