Date: Wed, 29 Dec 2004 16:14:46 -0500 From: MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Cc: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...260...>, Andreas Nilsson <nisses.mail@...563...>, Inkscape ML inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Suggestion for the preferences dialog
On Tue, 2004-12-28 at 23:49, Alan Horkan wrote:
I've used Borland Delphi once or twice and by comparison it is really difficult to say nice things about Glade except that it should be a pivotal part of the gnome desktop and it should be the easiest to use program there is but unfortunately it is a relatively neglected part of the toolchain (not even in the toolchain in most cases).
My feelings on Glade are pretty much summed up in one word: don't.
I do not doubt that many projects have used Glade badly and I am certain it does not do enough to make it easy to do things correctly. However it seems to be working well for Abiword and Gnumeric. (I dont think they use libglade, they do not generate the user interface at runtime).
Not because it's hard to use or anything like that, but because it makes makes reorganization and refactoring of code that incorporates it very difficult (except in the one sense that you don't need to care about where in the widget hierarchy a widget is to find it, but if you're writing your code properly that shouldn't be an issue anyway).
I cannot argue with that and like you said it is important to have well structured code. Abiword had the benefit of distinct seperation of the Model View Controller (MVC) long before they started using glade.
Glade also (in my own experience with older versions, anyway) places a strong temptation in front of designer to set fixed pixel dimensions for widgets.
The Gnome HIG does too unfortunately, I'd be inclined to blame the toolkit Java had a lot more built-in layouts so there wasn't much need for crudely specifying things manually using pixels. Web page design has influenced me too, and I think applications needs to resize and reflow just as web pages need to.
Just my few cents... admittedly much of the GUI code in Inkscape we inherited is an example of how _not_ to do things manually, but we can do better with the gtkmm rewrite.
I accept it isn't going to happen for Inkscape but I'm still trying to learn glade as mockups as I think it might be at least as useful as being able to put together graphic mockups.
- Alan