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

[Dietmar Schwertberger]

Am 11.06.2012 01:15, schrieb Chris Angelico:
> If you're a complete non-programmer, then of course that's an opaque
> block of text. But to a programmer, it ought to be fairly readable -
Well, I can read the code.
But still I would not be able (or interested) to write C++/GTK code.
With my rusty C++ knowledge and a simple GUI builder, I might be able
to create the GUI, though.
Whether I could then connect the events to actions is a different
question and depends on the GUI builder. If it does not support this,
then I would just not write the software.

That's the starting point of this thread: for Python we could not
identify such a GUI editor.


> it says what it does. I'm confident that anyone who's built a GUI
> should be able to figure out what that's going to create, even if
> you've never used GTK before. (And yes, it's not Python. Sorry. I
> don't have a Python example handy.)
All the discussion about casual users being able to implement GUIs by
manually coding it is somehow based on the assumption that suitable
examples for any purpose are available.
So to me the above example seems to be the proof that suitable examples
are not available easily.


> Modern UI toolkits are generally not that difficult to use. Add just a
> few convenience functions (you'll see a call to a "button" function in
> the above code - it creates a GTK2.Button, sets it up, and returns
> it), and make a nice, well-commented configuration file that just
> happens to be executed as Python, and you've made it pretty possible
> for a non-programmer to knock together a GUI. They'll have learned to
> write code without, perhaps, even realizing it.
Right, they are not too difficult to use for full-time programmers
or for people who want to invest a lot of time (as hobbyist).
But there are many people who just need to get things done and who
don't want to invest too many time on a simple GUI.

No matter how cool it may seem to create simple GUIs manually or to
write business letters using LaTeX: just try to persuade people to move
from Word to LaTeX for business letters...


Regards,

Dietmar