Re: Pythonic cross-platform GUI desingers à la Interface Builder (Re: what gui designer is everyone using)

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Jun 9, 2012 at 11:25 PM, Dietmar Schwertberger
<news at schwertberger.de> wrote:
> ... for many purposes only simple GUIs are required
> and it should be possible to create these without studying manuals
> (on toolkit and GUI editor).
> A typical simple GUI would e.g. be for a measurement / data aquisition
> program, where you just need some buttons and fields.
>
>
> If you have not used VB before, you should just try it. You can create
> GUIs within a few minutes even if you haven't used it before.
> (Sure, the fact that anyone can use it has the side effect that most
>  of these GUIs are not good...)

There's an assumption in most of the Windows world that everything
needs a GUI. For a simple data acquisition program, I wouldn't use one
- I'd have it run in a console. That's something that any programmer
should be able to create without studying complex manuals; all you
need to know is the basics of I/O and possibly argument parsing.

I've used Visual Basic. My first salaried work was on VB. Making it
easy to throw together a simple GUI doesn't mean a thing when you have
a large project to write - your business logic and UI design work will
massively dwarf the effort of actually throwing widgets into a
hierarchy. So the only time it's going to be an issue is with trivial
programs; which means there isn't much to be saved. Just make your
trivial things run in a console, and then either use a GUI builder
(several have been mentioned) or hand-write your UI code.

Actually, there's a third option these days. Give it no console and no
GUI, make it respond to HTTP connections, and use a web browser as
your UI. :)

ChrisA