cold shower request

wxPython Users
1

Peter Damoc wrote:

It's not just you, GUI designers can be a true pain in the ass sometimes and indeed for simple things can really slow you down BUT
for complex layouts they can prove to be a very good thing.

Actually, I think complex layouts are where they break down. I've never
seen a GUI designer that did not discourage the user from creating and
using custom controls. You are hard pressed to have a complex design
that does not group controls in a way that they could best joined into
a single class, and used that way.

Or a better example, the doctor comes and tells me that he wants a
tooltip on all the textfields, doing that from a GUI designer was a
very very easy BUT if I would have had to do it by hand...

You're kidding, right? You'd rather point and click at 50 text fields
than do a search and replace in a text editor? Bulk changes are EXACTLY
why you want code, rather than a point and clicky thing.

Sure you can do it by hand, sure is cleaner than a generated code,
sure it can even be optimised and if you are an expert you could be
faster, more efficient NOT using a GUI designer BUT for a begginer,
a GUI designer means discoverable features and that is something I
think should be the norm.

A good ide should have integrated help, etc, to help with this. However, I think you're seeing the classic conflict between "usability" and what I like to call "learn-to-usability". Marketing needs require focus on learn-to-usability, but if you sacrifice true, long-term productivity for easy of learning to use, you'll end up with a toy.

By the way, Peter, why start from scratch? I fail to see how your goals differ substantially from those of Dabo, Pythoncard, and Wax (or PyGUI, if you're really going to start from scratch)

-Chris

2

Andrea Gavana wrote:

but may I
suggest that you add the ability to put the tabs on the side, rather
than the top or bottom. If you have more than an few tabs, they really
fit much better lined up that way.

Mhm... do you mean *both* top and side tabs (at the same time)? Or just
select one of NB_TOP, NB_BOTTOM, NB_LEFT or NB_RIGHT?

Yes, I mean NB_LEFT and NB_RIGHT, but done across platforms so it looked good!

  In the first case, I

don't know how easy it would be... However, most screens have a width >
height, so I would have thought that the tabs fit better in a top or bottom
NotebookCtrl instead of side tabs. Or am I missing something?

But a text label on a tab is generally much wider than tall, so you can stack a lot more along the side that along the top. In ASCII-art:

First Tab | Second Tab | Third Tab | Forth Tab

vs:
First Tab
Second Tab
Third Tab
Forth Tab

This is already implemented in NotebookCtrl via a wx.SpinButton, that is
shown/created only when needed (ClientSize < cumulative size of tabs)

Right, except that it's a horrible interface.. the point of a notebook is that you can see all the tabs at once.

or the Windows way of multiple rows of tabs.

For this one, I have no idea on how to do it efficiently :wink:

Don't try. Of if you do, DON'T switch the rows around when a tab is selected, like Windows does!

wxGTK already supports this with the wx.NoteBook, and it is emulated on
Windows, but the emulation does not look good.

I am surely missing something...

try using NB_LEFT or NB_RIGHT on Windows and OS-X. last I tried, it was ugly as sin on Windows and didn't work on OS-X. That may have changed.

-Chris

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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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