Re: Glade is such a pain!

[John Darrington]

I've never played with GtkAssistant before, but now I try it, I get
similar results.  Some observations:

1. The fact that the buttons are not completely visible, I assume is a
   glade bug.  I think it'll look right in the application.

2. You'll get something looking closer to what (I think) you want if
   you set the "wrap" property to the label widget (click the button
   marked "Line wrap:")

3. Presumably you'll also want to set a page title (seems to be a
   packing property of the GtkAssistant widget).

4. If the GtkAssistant support in glade is too buggy, then you might
   find it easier to create the contents of each page in another
   widget (say a GtkWindow) and then cut and paste them when you're done.

5. If we're going to use GtkAssistant, then this means that we'll be
   depending on gtk+ 2.10.  Currently configure.ac specifies 2.8


I have mixed feelings about glade.  I find it useful for visualising
how a gui will look, particularly with respect to the packing options
of all the various container widgets, which can be almost impossible
to get right by setting them in the code.

However I think it makes the code less elegent, and thus maintenance
is harder. 

When starting a new dialog, I often have 3 or 4 attempts which I
abandon and start again from scratch before I get it right.

For quick changes to very local parts, it is sometimes easier to
directly edit the XML.


Hope this helps.

J'

On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 10:49:00PM -0800, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     So, I've been doing my best tonight to try to design a dialog
     box, or a series of dialog boxes, to import text data, and I am
     getting absolutely nowhere.  I look at the dialog boxes that
     existing applications use (for example, the ones that Gnumeric
     has for importing text data) and those in the Gnome human
     interface guidelines (for example, the one at
     http://library.gnome.org/devel/hig-book/stable/windows-assistant.html.en
     ).
     
     Then I try to make something similar in Glade that looks similar,
     and it seems impossible.  Consider the simple assistant in the
     webpage referenced above.  I want to make something that starts
     out in a similar way.  So I fire up glade-3 and try to do so.
     Start by clicking on the "Assistant" icon under "Toplevels".
     Then expand "assistant1" in the Inspector on the right, click on
     "label1" under it, select "Label", type some appropriate contents
     for what I'm doing.
     
     What I actually get looks like this:
             http://footstool.stanford.edu/~blp/foo.png
     This looks awful, nothing like what I want.
     
     OK, so this is a trivial example.  I want to do something more
     complex.  But glade seems to make it really difficult.  I guess
     my question is, am I missing something--does glade look and work
     better for the rest of you?  Or is it really about as easy to
     visualize the output as with editing the XML by hand in a text
     editor?
     -- 
     Ben Pfaff 
     http://benpfaff.org
     
     
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