Chatroom Ideas

[DemonWasp]

My GUI experience was like this:

1. Lame Turing GUIs (honestly, who doesn't have a combobox?)
2. Still-pretty-lame VB6 GUI (you can't even extend them, because the language doesn't support OOP)
3. Less-lame C++ Borland-specific GUIs (work fine, but...not on anything other than Windows)
4. HTML/CSS/JS frontend work during a work term (great...if only I hadn't been targetting IE)
5. Looked at Swing for about 10 minutes, decided I wanted to live and found SWT instead.

So I can't claim to be an expert, but Swing is the only thing that ever made me contemplate going insane as a preferable option.

I see your point about bitwise things (you have to keep referring to the API doc to know what you can use, and it's less Java-like), but it's nicer in the code to see THING1 | THING2 | THING3 than:

guiControl.setThing1 ( thing1 );
guiControl.setThing2 ( thing2 );
guiControl.setThing3 ( thing3 );

I will say that some of the tutorials are tough, though. It took some very careful reading to get into the one that told me how to do real-time syntax highlighting in an edit box...but once I read it, it was really really easy to do everything I needed to (or it would be, if I didn't still have a niggling bug in my code...).

[Aziz]

Swing isn't that hard, at first. Once you grasp the concept of layout managers, and the fact that you will need to nest them, it doesn't get hard until you decide you want to do complicated stuff.

And then there's the fact that SWING has an absolutely horrible FileDialog that is the reason I first looked into SWT. I haven't actually made a working app in SWT though.

[DemonWasp]

Making a *finished, working* app is for losers anyway. C'mon Aziz, you know that the only cool programs are the ones where half the features pop up message boxes saying things like "(To be implemented later)" and "Oh go away, I'm a lazy programmer".

I've got a 10%-complete application that already has a lot of the GUI in place. The GUI code is only a couple hundred lines, and most of that is spent on the event handlers for menu items (trivial, but lots of LOC consumption).

Getting started with SWT was a matter of minutes - copy-pasta the example and boom, done.

[r691175002]

I actually love swing. The ability to nest components in panels and layout managers provides a lot of flexibility and you can modify/extend any component into almost anything as long as you have a book on swing nearby. The file chooser is pretty terrible though. I have been meaning to check out swt for a while but have never felt the need to leave swing.

I can put together moderately complicated GUIs in a few minutes using GridBagLayouts and some helper classes I created for instantiating them without using 20 lines.

[btiffin]

I gotta drag you guys to REBOL. We need someone that can develop a nicer GUI from our bag of View components. VID is good and quick (one line GUIs), RebGUI for great for business look and feel, GLAYOUT doesn't get enough press, but rebols need an artist to give View some flair.

A tricky business that. Almost impossible to define, easy to spot and somewhat lacking where I code.

Excuse the interruption.
Cheers

[Aziz]

I'm in no way an artist. In fact, I go through about 5 layouts before I get a decent looking one for a website. I need to partner up with a marketting person for my freelance work.

Also, by working app, I meant something that has any functionality. The most I've done in SWT is have a button that changes the text on a label =/

[DemonWasp]

I have to say the same as Aziz: I'm about as much an artist as I am a musician (hint: I fail at most Guitar Hero songs on Easy, so you can imagine how well I do with actual music / art). It's a miracle if I can draw a straight line, and organic shapes are right out. I'm not the kind of person you want designing your GUI.

As for your program, Aziz, you've got a start. Once the app is running, you can add / change controls around easily enough...doubly so if you're using a decent IDE that will enumerate options for you .

[Aziz]

Well of course I just haven't done it. I haven't done anything in Java for a while, but my 2d tile map making program will be done eventually!

[Reality Check]

I'm pretty bad at GUI work overall. They work and all but I can never get them to look as good as other peoples. I'm just a really bad artist I guess...

[Aziz]

It has nothing to do with art. Interface design is quiet different. I suck at art, but I know how to design an interface (at least the compontents part. Skinning an application, well, not so good at, that takes art)