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From: leif@winsoft.se (Leif Samuelsson)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.open-look
Subject: Re: RED & GREEN BANANAS...XView/motif/Xt.. & XView
Message-ID: <137@winsoft.SE>
Date: 3 Jan 91 21:10:14 GMT
Organization: Winsoft Data, Stockholm, Sweden
Lines: 51


In article <5167@trantor.harris-atd.com> chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com (Chuck Musciano) writes:
>
>     I find GUIDE (actually, Devguide) to be very easy to use and have built
> several large (many windows, buttons, and gadgets) applications with it.  I
> estimate a factor 10X productivity when using GUIDE.
> [...]
>     Xview generates an OL interface.  The widget appearance and feel is 
> pure OL.  Your only choice is the layout, and you should read the OL Style
> Guide to learn how to lay things out.  The style guide is an excellent
> book.  You should read it, no matter which toolkit you use.

Devguide is an excellent tool for prototyping and designing an OL user
interface. It does however have one major drawback which makes it less
useful for production code.

The problem is that Devguide uses absolute pixel coordinates for
window sizes and panel item positioning, thereby bypassing XView's
automatic layout mechanism.  XView knows a lot about OL's rules for
button layout, margins, row distances, etc. Devguide does not.

This is especially noticable when you start a Devguide-designed
application with the -scale option. Try for instance starting
Devguide itself with "guide -scale extra_large". See what I mean?

I recently installed Chuck's excellent contool program which was built
using Devguide. I think contool looks best when started with the
"-scale small" option, but I had to edit the contool_ui.c file and
remove all the absolute coordinates to make the windows look decent.
I didn't feel all that good about doing this, because now the user
interface can no longer be changed with Devguide, and the code is
still hard to read (because it was generated from Devguide). The worst
of both worlds...

My recommendation is: use Devguide for designing what you want the
user interface to look like. It's saves a lot of time. But be aware
that if you use the code "as is", it probably won't be strictly OPEN
LOOK compliant.

Oh, and if you're using XView - don't forget to set WIN_BORDER to TRUE
for panels (control areas) that touch the bottom of the frame. It's
the law - and it looks so much nicer - but Devguide doesn't know it.



Leif Samuelsson

Winsoft Data			Phone: (011 468) 730-1240
Lidgatan 18			Fax:   (011 468) 730-3102
S-171 58 SOLNA			E-mail: leif@winsoft.se
Sweden