Thanks for posting.

I have been looking for ways which will enable me to allocate enough time to develop this project effectively but so far I have not found any.

I have been playing around with PythonCard. It seems to work but development has stalled which makes me nevious about commiting time to learn the inner workings.

Anyway we haven’t seen any posts from you in a year but I am hoping you are still monitoring this thread.

Tim

I’ve tried different GUI builders for wxPython and GTK. I’m currently coding a gui in pyGTK, pretty easy. I tried Glade 3 and although it seems good, as I was not really familiar with GTK back then, I preferred learning pyGTK before actually using Glade for production. And finally I never used it as I highly customize my widgets and that I haven’t found time to explore how to do that in Glade 3 (although there are some tutorials out there which explain how to do it).

That is for user experience: using a GUI builder does require some knowledge of what is happening behind the scene. I definitely wouldn’t have been able to build a GUI opaquely.

I’m not saying Glade 3 is bad eh! Just that in my experience, you need to know the toolkit before using its GUI builder to fully appreciate it! No?

Dan

If you want to avoid using vbox, hbox you can just use fixed containers which let you drag buttons and such around and resize graphically, etc. I find this very easy to use, and I am a science student who just needs simple gui’s . . . I admit that the signal stuff blew my mind a bit, but it didn’t take long to understand it enough to be productive, and I have never made a gui without glade 3, so I do use regularly.

Anyhow, just by 2 cents.

Gabriel

Though I’m very much a Python newbie, I have found PythonCard (http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/) to be an exceptionally easy and complete drag-n-drop GUI builder. It provides a complete application framework over wxWidgets, yet still permits direct access to wxWidgets when needed (which it hasn’t been, for me).

Do not be surprised by the lack of updates to PythonCard: It has a dynamic and resourceful user community, and whatever bugs PythonCard has are few and minor.

I’ve been using PythonCard to provide quick (but not dirty) GUIs for testing low-level protocol parser-generators, and to provide a convenient means for accessing parts of larger packages (such as matplotlib).

Give it a try. Even if it isn’t what you are looking for in a GUI designer, I suspect it will give you some new ideas about how to get what you want.

-BobC

Really, can you expect a casual programmer to deal productively with a WYSIWYG editor that uses VBoxes and HBoxes and all the signal connection exercises?

Imagine a Physics professor trying to write a simple GUI utility or a high-school student trying this for the first time or a teacher explaining a class of 12 year olds how to use such a designer.

The existing tools are completely beyond me. I tried them many times and never achieved any result. I find programming GUI by hand with all the learning curve involved much more productive.

Is it just me?

How are you doing?

I will take a look at Gazpacho again, however my current impression is that it is too far away from what I would like to see in terms of refactoring. In particular it uses hboxes and vboxes for layout and creates glade files instead of working code.

In any case I would love to discuss this with you at length.

Nir

igli, code completion does not imply “IDE land”. I suggest supplying code completion as a “service” to other modules. If the builder generates the code it can naturally provide meta information about it.

TJ, do you actually use wxGlade or the BoaConstructor to build GUI programs?

Gene, I tried the Qt designer a while ago but did not find it usable. In particular, like most other designers it uses HBoxex and VBoxes for layout. Visual Studio, while far from perfect, is the only system with which I managed to create a working GUI program easily without much confusion.