Re: [Toad-devel] UI toolkit vs UI design

[Janne Jalkanen]

<Ben>
> > > UI design is a prime concern for this project.  Choice of UI toolkit
> > > based on "looks good" or "high performance (on some architectures)"
> > > is not a concern at all.

<Ben>
> > > Design of the UI has nothing to do with the toolkit beyond "can I
> > > implement my good UI design with this toolkit?"

> choosing the UI toolkit based on how nice the widgets look.  The UI
> should be designed without any regard to which tooklit will implement
> it.

This is, for obvious reasons, impossible.  Reality will hit you by the
time you start to implement things :-).  Some things are just much
easier with other toolkits than with others.  We must also consider
the "developer experience" here - I am sure that INTERCAL is a
Turing-complete language, but nevertheless I would not make a
financial app with it =).

> I would much prefer a widget set that does what is asked of it, over one
> that looks great but is a monster to work with.  Therefore, UI design
> comes before widget prettiness in my book.

Obviously - my criticism was directed at your extreme denial of the
usefulness of UI look-and-feel being a criteria.  I am saying it is a
criteria - not as important one as a good design - but it is certainly
a big part of the overall user experience.

I agree that *in principle* you are correct.  However, my personal
experience says that you have to take reality into account - with some
toolkits some things are easier than others, and some toolkits (like
Motif or Tcl/Tk) just look so damned ugly that nobody is going to take
them seriously.

One of the things that we are shooting for here (even though nobody
has mentioned it publicly) is that we *do* want users for the
software.  As many users as possible.  And the sad fact is, that
people do choose software also based on how it looks.

> Your experience will be much appreciated.  Care to have a crack at it?

Of course - I wouldn't be complaining that much otherwise.  However,
the problem is that I am completely unfamiliar with Python UI
libraries, so the work is slow, error-prone, and entirely
sub-optimal.

-- 
Janne Jalkanen              //!
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