Re: [Fsfe-uk] An ignorant question?

[Roger Leigh]

Chris Croughton <address@hidden> writes:

> Glade doesn't seem to work properly without Gnome, ditto KDevelop with
> KDE.  I use fvwm (and that's another rant, having applications which
> depend on a specific window manager is asking for trouble).  I want
> something which will create straight X applications, not ones tailored
> to a specific WM.

Glade comes in two flavours, one is plain GTK+, the other has GNOME
support.  Neither are dependent on any particular WM.

BTW, nowadays Glade is not meant for use as an IDE (unlike KDevelop,
which is); it's a UI designer, full stop.  You load the saved XML
interface description using libglade, though for small projects I tend
to just create the interface "by hand"--gtk_box_pack_start()
et. al. aren't /that/ difficult.

One thing you might have noticed are GTK/GNOME apps looking better
when running GNOME.  This is purely due to the gnome-settings-daemon
changing the GTK+ defaults, which you can do from your ~/.gtkrc-2.0.

> (And another common thing with X applications --
> where are the keyboard shortcuts?  Far too many of them assume GUI =>
> pointing device, and forget about keyboard shortcuts, which is something
> even MS are not bad at.

Agreed.  Many programmers seem to forget that the keyboard exists.
GTK+ 2.x are vastly better WRT this; I've written GTK+ programs that
can be used completely from the keyboard--it's not a lot of effort to
set up the hotkeys, focus movement through dialogues and so on.  If
you are forced to use the mouse, it's badly designed, IMHO.

[...]
> As seen above -- "try this for Gnome, that for KDE, or build it from
> source for something different", most people will say "I'll use VB,
> I know that works".  And so, when I actually need a simple GUI, will
> I, because I need something that works /now/, where I can learn 90%
> of what I need through the help text and actually write an app in
> under half an hour.

All the VB apps I've had the displeasure to use were complete pants,
combining RSI-inducing interfaces with dog slow code.  Learning a
"proper" language and GUI toolkit will seem rather difficult at first,
but the quality of the work you will be doing will (potentially!) be
of a much higher standard.

I don't personally believe in RAD.  Perhaps I'm a bit old-fashioned,
but I like to plan what I'm going to write, even going as far as
speccing each module on paper, from overall design right down to
function prototypes and specifications.  The result is working,
documented, long-term maintainable code.  (And this is done in my free
time, for Free software projects, BTW.  Most free software is not
hastily slapped together junk.)

If you want to do something "right now", you're out of luck--you'll
need to invest some time into learning the fundamentals of your chosen
toolkit.  I'd suggest getting GTK+ (2.2), Qt (3.x), gtkmm (2.x), or
whatever takes your fancy, and work your way through the tutorials and
docs.  In a few weeks, you'll be up to writing seriously complex UIs.

As an example of a simple sort-of-RAD application, see
http://www.whinlatter.uklinux.net/gtk/ogcalc.c.  This took about six
hours to write, being unfamiliar with GTK+.  I used Glade to design
the interface, then constructed it by hand.  If you used Glade to do
all the interface, all you would need to do is write the callbacks and
load the interface--this would take a matter of minutes.

If this doesn't appeal, there are non-free tools like Kylix, but it's
not very popular in the Free software world.


[OT: It's over ten years since I last touched any BASIC-like stuff,
but I just started a new job, after a long period of unemployment,
writing software (unfortunately proprietary) for DOS-based
point-of-sale terminals.  After several years of coding with
C/C++/etc. on UNIX, it was quite a shock to use a (BASIC-alike 4GL)
language mostly written without things you take for granted, like
functions, types, structures, ADTs etc.  As an aside, they are
considering moving to GNU/Linux on MIPS, which sounds a lot more like
home!]

Partly because of this, and what Paul Johnson wrote, as well as
thoughts I've been having over the last few years, it seems like a
full accounts package for GNU/Linux would be perhaps /the/ killer
application for encouraging the adoption of Free software.  I do have
some experience of GTK+ and PostgreSQL I am willing to contribute if
any like-minded people are interested in collaborating on this (I
don't yet have a great knowledge of accounting, although I will be
learning quite soon for my job).


Regards,
Roger

-- 
Roger Leigh

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