Ideal D GUI Toolkit

[Peter Williams]

On 22/05/13 16:44, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> On 2013-05-22 07:00, Peter Williams wrote:
>
>> My experience (with PyGTK) is that GUI building tools actually make the
>> task harder not easier (once you become familiar with the API).  Of
>> course, things may have changed since I last used such a tool but I
>> doubt it.
>
> Then you obviously haven't used Interface Builder/Xcode on Mac OS X.
> It's a great tool for window building.

That is indeed the case.  I avoid all things Apple as my experience has 
been that they seem to think they still own a device after they've sold 
it to me.

Most of my experience with such tools was with Glade.

I found that Glade produced a lot of code to do very little.

>
>> Having said that I have to admit that I've implemented my own "list/tree
>> specification" mechanism for that particular job because it made it
>> easier to find where to make changes.  In my defence, last time I used
>> one of the GUI building tools it contained no support for building lists
>> and trees so making my own made sense.
>
> If the tool didn't support trees you obviously used a bad tool.

Probably.

> In Xcode
> you can drag in a standard view, then change the implementation class.
> This allows you to add your custom views to the window using the GUI
> builder. It used to have plugins for this but they were removed in Xcode 4.
>

What you describe isn't a very attractive work flow (for me).  Using 
PyGTK direct I just use normal OOP techniques to extend widget classes 
and adding a widget to a window is very simple operation (1 statement) 
and certainly doesn't need a GUI to achieve it.

The part of creating a tree that I use my specification mechanism for is 
defining/setting up the columns and setting options on them which I 
don't think would be made easier using a GUI.

Peter