Re: Use of any interface designer - is it worthy?

["Jonathon Jongsma" <jonathon jongsma gmail com>]

On 5/18/06, Arthur Maciel <arthurmaciel gmail com> wrote:
> Hi there.
> I would like to know from you who have practice working with gtkmm
> (specially from Murray - I've seen your projects) if you use some
> program to help you with interface design (like Glade(mm) and Gideon)
> or if you write your own code, including for the interface design.
> The fact is I'm trying to create some projects to ipaq 2210 running
> Familliar Linux and Gtkmm is fully ported, but I was developing using
> Gideon, and I cannot see the horizon of re-cross-compilation process
> of updated dependencies of Gideon into the ipaq, in a way I could
> install it on the pda.
> In resume, I want to know from you (who own many projects) if writing
> the whole code is as well productive as using interface design
> programs.

I don't use an interface designer for my project, and haven't found it
to be too difficult.  That said, my project is fairly simple, and I
would recommend using a UI designer instead of writing it manually,
especially if your UI is not very simple (and I may move there
eventually too).
The one question I have about glade / libglade is whether it handles
UIManager widgets well.  I think one of the reasons for designing
Gideon was to handle these newer GTK features better since glade's XML
file didn't have a good way to handle them (??).  Does anybody have
any experience with glade and UIManager?  I've found UIManager to be
really nice for constructing menus and toolbars.
One other point to note is that the GTK+ developers plan to move
libglade into the core GTK+ library (see
http://live.gnome.org/LibgladeInGtk).  By the way, looking at the
page, they have a list of future featues which includes "Support for
building GtkUIManager based interfaces".  So it looks like I was right
that it's not currently possible to use UIManager with libglade...

Jonner