[Glade-devel] glade-3 with 'test-mode'

[karma at deadmoose.com (David Hoover)]

> Thats not very hard to accomplish; but what do you get out of it ?
>
> you could "see" how widgets react; but you wouldn't have any navigation
> installed at this point.
There are a couple things I can think of, and in fact I've written a
quicky program 'playglade' that just calls gtk_init() & glade_xml_new()
on argv[1] for just these reasons:

You can get nicer screenshots: I'll do mockups of things & bounce them
back and forth with some of our marketing people, and frankly sometimes
the mockup is pretty ugly inside glade itself, with all the placeholders
in my tables, etc. Also, if a widget is set to be desensitized, it ISN'T
while in glade, so if something's semi-permanently greyed out (I've got
features they want to layout the UI spot for atm but backend things
don't yet support), a screenshot of the tool in glade isn't quite
accurate.

And similarly to that, you can see how things really pack & expand &
whatnot once the placeholders are out of the way; sometimes you get some
drastically different behavior because a placeholder stretches things
out in somewhat weird ways. Also, if you have widgets set to be
invisible, they're all visible while in glade, so they can have some
serious impact.

For instance, I have a page where I have a picture on the right
generated based on the values in a bunch of widgets on the left. There
are a handful of different pictures, so at the top, there's a combobox
to choose which one to do. Based on that, the inputs are drastically
different, so the easiest approach I've found is to lay those all out
inside one big tall screen-stretching vbox in glade, and always have all
but one set invisible. That makes for a really tall, really ugly window
while I'm monkeying around in glade, but it looks just peachy once it's
displayed for real, since the vast majority of widgets disappear off the
screen.

So without your full program logic, there's a bunch of stuff that
doesn't necessarily work (treeviews, fancier comboboxes, any logic about
things getting dynamically sensitized/hidden/etc), but for a bunch of
basic stuff, you can actually see some fairly nice pictures with some
simple-minded behavior