[Glade-devel] Building User Interfaces by Direct Manipulation (Cardelli paper)

[tvb at gnome.org (Tristan Van Berkom)]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 1:23 AM, Paul Dufresne <dufresnep at gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>  "Second rule of stretching: as a dialog stretches from a minimum size,
>  the distance between an attachment point and its interactor edge
>  remains constant."
>
>  That's all about what I care!
>
>  To help understand better, the next paragraph:
>  "An effective heuristic for setting a roughly correct stretching
>  behaviour is to select all the interactors in a dialog and double
>  click one of them. This will project all the attachment points of all
>  the interactors to their corresponding closest dialog edge. (In the
>  case of the card file dialog, this is exactly what we want:
>  interactors close to the corners will stick to the corners, and
>  interactors near the center will stretch in the appropriate direction.)
>  The few incorrect attachments can then be fixed by hand."

Just to make sure I was clear, if we were to discuss about
container widgets in the gtk+ toolkit, we would be discussing
on the Gtk+ mailing list, in Glade all we do is generate xml
UI descriptions... that being said, Gtk+'s resizing capabilities
is one of the bigger advantages of using gtk+ in the first place,
the document you are reffering to describes a different kind of
layout system.

Now, what _would_ be relavent on this list and productive, is
to consider that
  a.) We have in our grasp already a highly functional and scalable
       widget layout system in gtk+ using its various containers and
       alignments
  b.) For people used to working in a zordered fixed positioning
       system this system is somewhat uncomfortable at first.

So how can we
  a.) make our existing systems that are in place more comfortable to use
       through the UI.
  b.) use our UI to better educate the user about how the widget positioning
       system works.

Cheers,
                      -Tristan