wxDesigner: Commercial dialog editor for wxWindows and wxPython

Sat Jul 15 18:50:02 EDT 2000

Coming from VB, I decided to give the editor a try.  It's nice, but I
wouldn't pay 70 american dollars for it.  I hope my comments will be
useful...

Great points:
1 - I love the idea of representing the hiearchy of sizers and widgets in a
treeview, especially that you use different icons for the two.  Would be
even better if you used an icon representing the type of widget, and put the
widget name as the node's string value.

2 - Ability to test your dialog.  This is great to make sure it resizes
correctly.

3 - Ability to output to C++, Pyhthon or XML.  Would be even cooler if you
exposed the objects so more persisters could be written (by third parties)

4 - Highlighting the current widget and the widget's parent.  Excellent to
keep track of the relationships.

Not so great points:

5 - The toolbars at the top of the editor are overwhelming (at first) and it
would be very nice to either re-organize/customize them, to dock/undock
sections or to turn them on and off at will.  Maybe giving the toolbars
names, too, would help disambiguate the actions.

6 - Inability to move controls around (drag and drop) after they are placed
on the form (without resorting to cut/paste - which, incidentally, doesn't
work with Ctrl+Insert, Shift+Delete and Shift+Insert, respectively Copy, Cut
and Paste)

7 - No keyboard support, especially the DELETE key not doing anything in
either the treeview or the main editor.

8 - Must use a seperate dialog to change properties of widgets or
containers.  A property grid would be excellent for this.

9 - Right-clicking on nodes of the treeview does nothing.  If suggestion "1"
was implemented, it would be nice to have the same context menu as there is
when right-clicking on the widget itself.

10 - Single document interface makes it hard to do many things at once.
(maybe this is a limitation of wxWindows?)

11 - Unable to select multiple controls (to move them all around, to
cut/copy them all, to delete them all, etc..)

12 - There's no "Proportional" button in the toolbar. (???)

13 - "Empty spaces" only show up blank.  It would be nice if the editor gave
you an indication that you had put an "empty space" on the form, only when
you are editing.

14 - New widgets appear in a weird way.  I'd like to drag a new widget in
the spot I want it to go, instead of deciding ahead of time where it will go
before or after the currently selected widget.  (So, to add a new widget, I
have to first click on an existing one, click either before or after, then
click on the new one.  I usually think of it backwards:  I choose a new
widget then find where to put it.)

15 - Closed source, commercial product.  I would want to help out if it was
open-source.  I would also be willing to pay for the product, if it had the
features I mention above...

It's a promising product.  I'll be happy to test out the next version, as I
really like the hiearchical representation of the relationships and it could
prove very useful in designing large applications.

Good luck!

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Olivier A. Dagenais - Carleton University - Computer Science III

"Robert Roebling" <roebling at ruf.uni-freiburg.de> wrote in message
news:39700FD0.3C368827 at ruf.uni-freiburg.de...
>
>   Hello,
>
> [I am using this list, since the python-announce list is no
>  longer functional.]
>
> I would like to announce wxDesigner 1.0, a commercial program
> that can be used in connection with the free C++ GUI wxWindows
> library and its populare Python bindings called wxPython.
>
> wxDesigner is a dialog editor that allows its users to visually
> create dialogs using a simple point and click interface. The
> output produced by wxDesigner can be either of C++ code, Python
> code or XML, making co-development with wxWindows and wxPython
> much easier than before.
>
> wxDesigner is available for Windows and Linux (Intel and PowerPC),
> more information including pricing is available from:
>
>   http://www.roebling.de
>
> For more information about wxWindows and wxPython, have a look at:
>
>   http://www.wxwindows.org
>   http://www.wxpython.org
>
> Regards,
>
>     Robert Roebling <mailto:roebling at ruf.uni-freiburg.de>
>
> <P><A HREF="http://www.roebling.de">wxDesigner 1.0</A> -
>    Commercial dialog editor for wxWindows and wxPython. (13-July-2000)
>
>