Programmatically build UI's considered harmful...

I'd like to lay out the advantages/disadvantages of building UI's directly
in languages like C (or python, or whatever) vs. using UI builders (e.g.
glade).

For building UI's the old way:
      o somewhat smaller footprint (need to quantify).
      o lower learning curve, as most people have usually done it this way.
      o certain apps, maybe 5% of all apps, are beyond what any UI tool
        can handle (e.g. drawing programs). Even most of their UI can
        generally built with a UI builder, with only one or a few specialized
        widgets.

Against:
      o much more work to deal with different display sizes. Right off the
        bat, we have the two screen rotations, and you can expect that screen
        sizes will continue to evolve. We also have:
        - displays like on the Jornada 72x boxes, which are wide and not very
          high
        - your laptop (mine is 1400x1050)
        - Others, from 1024x768 to as high as 4Kx4K.
      o very seldom do programmers go beyond minimal support for resizing.
        we need to handle serious UI changes as apps are used (and migrated
        between) different sized screens (even a simple rotation is a resize).
        When you have a big screen, often you want to seriously change the UI.
      o Some people are much better at designing UI's than others (and in fact,
        some of these are non-programmers). And the UI's can be reworked
        without having to understand the C code for consistency. Making
        it possible to have UI folks work on tweaking the UI without messing
        with the underlying code ends up being a major feature.
      o I18N is easier: sometimes simple string substituion just doesn't hack
        it: things don't fit and you have to go tweak the UI to make things
        fit. The smaller the screen, the more likely this is to occur.

So I believe glade/libglade really carry their weight.

(Un)fortunately, I'm likely to be out of touch this week and next, so
won't be able to add much more to this conversation for a while..
                               - Jim

--
Jim Gettys
Cambridge Research Laboratory
HP Labs, Hewlett-Packard Company
Jim.Gettys_at_hp.com