Re: grid widget (was Re: possible removal of GtkWrapBox)

[Havoc Pennington <hp pobox com>]

Hi,

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 1:18 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
<federico ximian com> wrote:
> However, who writes UIs by hand these days?  Doesn't everyone just use
> Glade?

It's a valid point, but I don't know that Glade is always easiest. I
don't think it's a good excuse for making the actual API crappy.

(In fact I'd almost think Glade should have its own container widget
that's designed to be easy to use in a builder, just as in code it's
good to have a container widget that's easy to use in code. Do the
same top-down exercise with Glade - what would make a container easy
to work with in a UI builder - and design based on that.)

> I don't know how many other examples you considered while thinking about
> your API, but let's see about those three:

I knew these were built into gtk and probably ui files, but I still
think they're good examples of reasonably complex layouts that show
some of what people want to do.

> * Our HIG-beloved sections with indented contents in dialog boxes.
> There is no official solution to this, and various apps do different
> hacks to achieve them.

I was thinking this could be built into Grid, but it's normally done
with a frame right? Which seems OK too except that Frame's defaults
don't match what's wanted. Possibly needed here is a GtkBin that looks
the GNOME HIG way on Linux and a windowsy/mac-y way on other
platforms.

> If you are making your UIs with Glade, it would help for Glade's
> usability to be improved in a similar fashion.  We should study what
> kinds of tricks people use to rearrange widgets... creating a temporary
> window, inserting a container, then cutting&pasting widgets into it to
> create a holding space, is pretty cumbersome.

Exactly, doing an interaction design of how layout should be done in
Glade, then designing a widget just for that... would be awesome.

Maybe the easy-to-code widget matches the glade widget, I don't know.

Not saying we'd hide the glade widget from code or hide the code
widget from glade, just that it might make sense to have a widget
optimized for those two cases.

Havoc