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Re: Form Designer [message #24935 is a reply to message #24933]

Fri, 05 February 2010 09:13

cbpporter
Messages: 1401
Registered: September 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Hi gedumer,

You are right about some of these tools being counterintuitive, but this is not just the sign of less then perfect GUI design of the tools, but a reflection of different kind of objects and work flow.

Both the image designer and layout designer don't save some binary files, edit your source code or otherwise magically do the stuff you want. They edit the ".lay" and ".iml" files, which are C++ code. So opening up the editor without an associated file doesn't make that much sense. I guess you could open a new empty document and use "Save As" to save it to disk to be more like other tools, but I don't know if it is worth the effort.

Menus are a different subject. This is not like Delphi, where every menu item has its own variable. You only have access to the Menubar object, and you create a menu with callbacks. also, you do not add the main menu in the designer, you add it as a frame in code. Frames are hard to understand initially, but they offer huge benefits. Frames reduce the active surface of any widget and insert there another widget. This means that you can add a menu, a border or pretty much anything you desire to any widget, and the widget doesn't have to know about the frame, or take measures to update its size and behavior.

So the layout editor should not be used for menus and toolbars.

Also, the layout editor is a little bit poor on features and doesn't offer all the options that you would like. I think this is intentional, but I don't agree with this. Right now you set between 60% and 90% of properties in the editor, depending on widget, and the rest in code. This may or may not be improved in the future.

Also important, you must right click on the layout editor to insert a widget. Again, a miss feature, but I don't have time to improve this, and also once you learn it, it won't bother you anymore.

While the layout editor might not be as user friendly, it is very strong. You can apply your layouts to anything, including a Button or EditBox. While this is not that useful for Buttons, it is great with your custom widgets. Great feature that one learns to appreciate and rely upon.

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