Re: Best GUI designer (preferable for Eclipse)

Andrew Thompson wrote:

[...]
To put that another way, D'n'D GUI produces
horrid, unmaintainable code that is usuall
'locked in' to whatever 'GUI designer of
the minute' was used to write it.

One of the design goals of the JGoodies Forms
layout system is to overcome this problem.
Visual designers that support the FormLayout
*can* produce source code that humans can read,
understand, and edit.

GUI designers also tend to make the simplest
things easy, while getting in the way of
doing anything *beyond* the trivially simple.

That's a tendency; however, some designers help
in some use cases. It seems that many developers
cannot *find* a good design easily, where they
can *implement* it quite well - by hand or with
a visual designer. An interactive layout environment
(hand or visual designer or whatever) can assist
in finding good design via previews, instant preview,
etc.

I personally can find good design with paper and
pencil drafts quickly; see the "Visual Design Draft" at
http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/bookfinder/makingof.html
I start "editing" a mental design before I put
the first draft on paper. That's the majority of
the design work. After implementing a visual design,
I tweak it by hand.

So, I'd say visual designers have their role
and can add real value for some developers.
In my opinion the JFormDesigner is an example
for a well done visual designer; it has a plugin
for Eclipse. Another good designer is the one
that comes with IDEA.

-Karsten

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Server-side workflow engine (Win32)?
    ... I was thinking about ditching the whole visual designer altogether. ... the more complex the state machine the harder it ... the statemachine is executed as the program. ... statemachine design. ...
    (borland.public.delphi.thirdpartytools.general)
  • Site critique requested (mostly accessibility issues, but anything else welcome)
    ... This is the first time, in reading this group over many years, I've asked for a site crit, so may I say that I'm not a visual designer, I'm our software engineer, but I've had to fill in for the regular designer because of time constraints. ... I've tried to design the look of the site in parallel with the design of the custom-built content maintenance system - which means ring-fencing the main text so I can publish a text-only/printable site in parallel with the main one. ...
    (uk.net.web.authoring)
  • Re: Relations Not Created in Typed Dataset
    ... Why is this by design!? ... What is the point of a visual designer then? ... > Hi TJO, ... >> relation between the two tables and generated a typed dataset. ...
    (microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet)
  • Re: emacs Vs Eclipse?
    ... That would be bad UI design. ... > You probably can't blame the GUI designer too much for this ... If they considered the keyboard the main ... interface, we'd have windowy applications which users used only ...
    (comp.lang.java.programmer)
  • Re: When Longhorn release, Linux got killed.
    ... I'm not a gui designer. ... >>bigger than 2D therefore you have more opportunity to design in it. ... Peoples' ability to perceive depth varies a lot, ... "very few people approach me in real life and insist on proving they ...
    (comp.os.linux.misc)