Re: Programmatically build UI's considered harmful...

Just to add one more point/difficulty:
You are right with the additional abstraction using a GUI builder
against direct programming (though I think that a subset of those
problems can very well be addressed by the direct approach ... only when
you start to completely change the UI upon resize then the additional
abstraction is needed). But what I originally wanted ... you get into
trouble when you leave the standard toolkit's road and start to use
custom widgets like we now have in GPE. Then the GUI designer does not
help you anymore; at least Glade can't. So I think this approach _could_
involve higher efforts...

CU
  nils

On Mon, 19 Aug 2002 07:40:32 -0700 (PDT)
<Jim.Gettys_at_hp.com> wrote:
> 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

-- 
kernel concepts          Tel: +49-271-771091-12
Dreisbachstr. 24         Fax: +49-271-771091-19
D-57250 Netphen          D1 : +49-170-2729106
--