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

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

On Thu, 2010-10-07 at 15:05 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 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.

Oh, no, of course not.  What I mean is that if few apps actually do
complex layout by hand, then maybe it's better to spend effort in making
Glade good.  But I like a lot what you say below.

> (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.)

This is very interesting.  We should definitely ask the designers.  Off
the top of my head, here is what happens right now:

1. You sketch your UI in a napkin or some suitable fibrous material.
Due to your extensive training in visual aesthetics, your UI is
well-balanced, it has good use of whitespace, etc.

2. You fire up Glade.

3. You throw in some tables and boxes to contain the elements which are
visually aligned in your sketch.

4. ... Hours pass ...

5. You give up as GTK+ plainly doesn't let you adjust whitespace in an
intuitive way, and it is really hard to size widgets like treeviews,
etc.  Your UI looks halfway decent but squashed, like if you had run
GIMP's "zealous crop" on your napkin sketch (that's the filter that
removes all empty rows/columns of pixels, leaving effectively no
whitespace).

6. At some point you actually run your UI against translations which
change the length of the text labels, and you give up for the second
time :)

When using Glade, the problem is not usually figuring out the grid you
need (you just throw in a table and insert/delete cells as appropriate).
The problem is having to endlessly tweak all the parameters that modify
how things respond to their cells.  Then tweaking all the things that
affect how things resize.  Then realizing that whitespace is basically
impossible to do.

There's too much mousing around.  Click on a widget.  Move the mouse all
the way to the properties area.  Tweak tweak tweak.  Move back to the UI
to click on another widget.  All that back-and-forth is very wasteful.

OK, I'm just complaining here.  It would be good to sit down together in
the Summit and see how people use Glade.

  Federico