kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 8/17/2015 9:14 AM, David Novak wrote:
>> To be honest, I've never been a big fan of dialog box layout tools.
>> Their strength is there weakness.  They promote designing quick dialog
>> box layouts that makes reuse difficult.  Take a look at the padding and
>> overall layout in KiCad's dialogs.  They are all over the map.  I prefer
>> hand coding dialogs.  It's painfully slow but encourages reuse (well
>> designed base dialog classes) and standardization (using wxSizerFlags).
> 
> I agree with Wayne. Dialog layout tools are nice to get up and running
> quickly, but the more I use them, the more they get in the way. On
> internal projects, my team ends up implementing workarounds for advanced
> features.
> 
> I've recently started trying to convince my team to code the dialogs by
> hand. In my mind, with a little planning up front, hand coding the
> dialog could be relatively quick.
> 
> David
> 

Thanks for the vote of confidence.  I thought I was the lone voice in
the woods when it came to hand coding dialogs.  I doubt we will have an
easy time convincing everyone else it's a good idea.  That being said,
we may end up in a position where we have no option if there is not a
viable open source option.  I would reject using a proprietary tool and
I don't want to waste precious KiCad development resources maintaining
wxFormBuilder.

> 
> On 8/13/2015 2:41 PM, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>>
>> On 8/13/2015 2:05 PM, jp charras wrote:
>>> Le 13/08/2015 18:36, Eldar Khayrullin a écrit :
>>>> Hi all.
>>>> Maybe in future need to port kicad in other modern gui as qt(
>>>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(software) )
>>> A bit overkilled for this issue (if this is an issue).
>>> I am not especially thrilled by QT.
>>> This is a very good tool, but it has its own issues.
>>> Good luck to volunteers who will port 400 000 lines of code relative
>>> to GUI.
>>> (80% of code of any application; Kicad has more than 500 000 lines of
>>> code)
>> We'll leave that decision to the next project manager.  This project
>> manager is not interested porting KiCad to QT.  This has been discussed
>> before.
>>
>>>> 13.08.2015 13:00, Blair Bonnett пишет:
>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>
>>>>> It appears wxFormBuilder is, if not dead, not far from it. The
>>>>> evidence:
>>>>>
>>>>> * No stable release in 4 years, and the last beta release was 13
>>>>> months ago.
>>> Although I agree with the fact wxFormBuilder is not actively maintained,
>>> the last release was made the 17 June.
>>>
>>> I share your concern about wxFormBuilder.
>>>
>>> But replacing it is not easy.
>>>
>>> To answer one of your questions, before using wxFormBuilder, I used
>>> DialogBox (free version).
>> I'm reluctant to use proprietary tools for all of the usual reasons.  I
>> would rather code dialogs by hand than use a proprietary tool.
>>
>>> It worked fine and was easy to use.
>>> It is written and maintained by the creator of wxWidgets.
>>>
>>> But the user code is embedded in automatically generated DialogBox.
>>> I did not used recent versions, so it is perhaps now different.
>>>
>>> One on the *best features* of wxFormBuilder is the fact it creates
>>> "black box" files and all the user code is in other files.
>>> You even do not need to read them.
>>>
>>> Any other candidate should have this feature.
>>>
>>> We need volunteers to test other candidates (in fact a very few
>>> candidates)
>> To be honest, I've never been a big fan of dialog box layout tools.
>> Their strength is there weakness.  They promote designing quick dialog
>> box layouts that makes reuse difficult.  Take a look at the padding and
>> overall layout in KiCad's dialogs.  They are all over the map.  I prefer
>> hand coding dialogs.  It's painfully slow but encourages reuse (well
>> designed base dialog classes) and standardization (using wxSizerFlags).
>>   I got shot down the last time I suggested this and I understand the
>> reasoning.
>>
>>>
>>>>> * A grand total of 13 commits in the last 12 months (current trunk is
>>>>> r2205, r2192 was made on 1 August 2014). A number of these are
>>>>> buildsystem / release / changelog (!) updates.
>>>>> * No developer responses on the mailing list, including to a message
>>>>> three months ago [1] asking if the project was still active.
>>>>> * No support for newer widgets. For example, the wxSpinCtrlDouble
>>>>> widget added in wxWidgets 2.9.0 is not supported. I patched it to add
>>>>> this widget back in April and posted the patch to both the mailing
>>>>> list and an existing ticket from three years ago [2]. No response to
>>>>> that either.
>>>>>
>>>>> We may have to start thinking about whether we continue with it from
>>>>> here, or consider a move towards a different tool.
>>>>>
>>>>> I realise any change like this isn't going to happen prior to the
>>>>> stable release, and nor am I suggesting it should. But with the recent
>>>>> post to this list about UI improvements, I think this is a highly
>>>>> related topic which should be discussed as well.
>>>>>
>>>>> There are a number of alternatives listed on the wxWidgets wiki [3].
>>>>> Does anybody have any experience with any of them? (Spoiler alert, I
>>>>> don't). Are there any thoughts on how to proceed from here?
>>>>>
>>>>> Regards
>>>>> Blair
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> [1] https://sourceforge.net/p/wxformbuilder/mailman/message/34100789/
>>>>> [2] https://sourceforge.net/p/wxformbuilder/feature-requests/45/
>>>>> [3]
>>>>> https://wiki.wxwidgets.org/Tools#Rapid_Application_Development_.2F_GUI_Builders
>>>>>
>>>
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> 
> 
> 
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