Re: Programatically Designing a GUI
Re: Programatically Designing a GUI
- Subject: Re: Programatically Designing a GUI
- From: "Phil Barrett" <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 18:09:32 +0100
>
Yes, you can create all interfaces programmatically. It is darn hard to
do,
>
but you can do it.
It's not that hard at all ... if you already have a programmatic UI layer
and your apps all use it.
We wrote just such a layer last year, and implemented it on Windows and
Motif. When the time came to do the Mac port, it took two programmers less
than two weeks to write the bulk of the Cocoa layer.
We'd say it was a great success, because we only needed (for example) to
write code to create a context menu once, and all our context menus then
work, exactly the same, on all platforms - and if we want to change some UI,
we do it once and it's changed on all platforms.
For creating UI from scratch, we have a portable layout editor, written
using the programmatic UI.
The only time-consuming bit is that we're having to re-layout some windows
and panels because of the large size of some Aqua elements (notably text
buttons).
Phil
PS our application (Animo) is currently around three million lines of
(almost all) C++ and was born on NeXTSTEP. Indeed, in the early '90s it was
one of the big applications that kept NeXTSTEP selling. We've been away on
IRIX and Windows, but we're coming home now.
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- From: Chilton Webb <email@hidden>