Re: gtkada/glade info needed

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Preben Randhol wrote:

> First principle is that when you make GUI with GtkAda (GTK+) you should
> not do it the way Delphi projects do. That is put buttons etc in fixed
> positions. GTK+ uses horisontal and vertical boxes to pack buttons
> etc... so that when you scale your application the layout looks good.
>

Kind of figured out that part for myself - eventually. I can learn to work
with whatever model they want to propose, but I'm just not a mindreader. I'm
hoping to find some info on how to drive the Glade thingie around, how to
setp-by-step get the various things into the window & make them look good,
etc. As I said previously, I managed to get some buttons and text boxes and
stuff like that onto the window, but it looks like defication. And I'm sure
I've violated every single intention of the designers in how to build a GUI.
But nobody wrote down: "Here's how you go about it: First you lay down a
window, then you pop one of these thingies on it, then you edit such-and-such
and..." One walk-through example that showed you how to put basic features
onto the screen in the order they belong (the layer thing is confusing to me
because its different than the usual Windows GUI-builder idea of simply
positioning elements on a pasteboard.) would go a long way to making the tool
easier to use. Something just a bit bigger than "Hello World" but not by
much. Demonstration of buttons, menus, text strings, text blocks, popups and
dialogs ought to about do it. But it needs to suggest *how* to get the things
onto the screen in an attractive form as well as simply the mechanics of
getting the things on the screen.

>
> I recommend that you look at these links, even though the examples are
> in C it is easy to translate into Ada 95 using GtkAda:
>

Thanks for the links. I'll look them over. However, my problem isn't so much
GTK as it is the GUI builder and getting the code generation to work.

>
> I dunno, I use Linux as I find that Windows suck.
>

If you're looking for an argument about the relative suckage of Windows,
you're talking to the wrong guy. But of course, a fundamental point of
philosophy would be that just because Windows = Sucks, does not imply that
(not Windows) = Cool. IMHO, any form of Unix also sucks, but for a lot
longer.

> And how many $ do you have to pay up for the public version of  GNAT +
> GtkAda + Glade compared to MSVC++? :-)
>

Hey, I understand the price is right. That certainly is an attraction. But if
you go to a restaurant and the waitress comes by and says "They burnt your
french fries so they gave you more of them and there's no charge" do you
still eat the fries? I like freebies, but if it doesn't work, it doesn't do
me much good. It also discourages usage of Ada in general if a newbie is
confronted with too many problems getting tools to work.

> The Linux version works nicely at least and I'm very impressed with the
> work put in by the GtkAda developers.

I'll agree that they put a lot of work into it and they have some very nice
things there. Maybe its just not stabilized enough on the Windows side.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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