[Squeak] Need for GUI-Building-Tool
Charles Hixson
charleshixsn at earthlink.net
Mon Jul 15 17:10:30 UTC 2002
Kevin Fisher wrote:
>I've only just begun playing with BobsUI and I must say, it's very nice...I
>certainly wish there was a 'standard' widget-like set of classes (like BobsUI)
>in the default Squeak image. I know that relatively 'simple' things like
>creating a text entry box that accepts anything typed into it without an
>explicit "carriage return" (accept) has stymied me in the past..but obviously,
>the BobsUI rolodex example does it properly (had I known about it, I would have
>used it in a previous project).
>
>...
>
Those are nice features, but the main thing that a standardized
GUI-Builder would need to contribute would be a way to create a dialog
that could be frozen (i.e., the character and position of the fields
fixed in place), but which could later be melted, so that redesigns were
possible. There are large areas that are closed to Squeak because of
the lack of the way of building fixed dialogs. The other big need is
for a comparable report generator.
The environment I'm comparing this against is MS Access. Now the
programming language of MS Access it terrible. But because it's easy to
build dialogs and reports, it's quite popular. It certainly isn't
spectacular as a database. It's internally inconsistent. Programs tend
to break if you leave them to be used. Versions are inconsistent, and
later versions tend to corrupt earlier versions. But it's strengths in
Dialog design and Report design are sufficient to overwhelm these other
problems. I hate it, but I generally end up deciding that it's the best
tool that I can find for the job at hand. I really tried to get Squeak
in as a replacement for some applications, but design criteria insist on
the dialogs being freezeable. (They claim frozen, but they keep coming
back to me with change requests. But they come to me, they don't *want*
to be able to make the changes themselves. And management doesn't want
it either.)
I realize that this isn't the primary area of interest for Squeak
development, but it seems to me that the ability to freeze and melt a
dialog should be pretty easy to implement (of course, I say this as
someone who has never completed the tutorial ... once I was told the
featues I needed weren't available, I stopped actively looking). And it
would open up Squeak to a large number of new users. (Of course, it
would take them time to learn about it, but making it possible is the
first step.)
--
-- Charles Hixson
Gnu software that is free,
The best is yet to be.
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