[Mono-osx] Stetic GUI Designer

[Bart Masschelein]

I would be happy with such a temporary solution. If you want a button,  
you could select it from a panel of widgets, it appears somewhere on  
the form, and then with the arrows you can move it to the (more or  
less) correct position. Ctrl+arrows could resize them for instance.  
And with the properties panel you can set the name, text and with the  
event panel you can select the appropriate event for which then code  
is automatically inserted.

Because that is why I currently don't create GUIs yet in MD: its not  
so much about the ease of positioning widgets in the correct place,  
it's about all the properties and events I don't want to write  
manually. Properties because without a designer it's hard to know  
which are available, and for the events because of the automatic  
creation of the appropriate events.

I agree it will be hard to create group boxes like this for instance,  
but for simple GUIs it's ok, and are better then using console  
applications with text input.

In Visual Studio, I never create a console application anymore,  
because of the ease of creating a textbox and three buttons and a file  
dialog, which facilitate a lot the testing phase of program.

Bart

On 01 Dec 2008, at 12:56, Matt Emson wrote:

> Geoff Norton wrote:
>> Completely unusable.
>>
> Coming from a Borland Delphi background, I've been exposed to a  
> "different way" that might be utilised here?! In Delphi, we didn't  
> tend to use drag and drop for component placement (which IIRC didn't  
> come about till they changed the designer in Delphi 8) and I always  
> used the keyboard to do finer adjustments to the GUI I design (which  
> also works (with slight variation) in Visual Studio.) So two comments:
>
> 1) Can Stetic not emulate the way Delphi drops components (at least  
> on Mac OS X target)? In the Delphi (1-7 at least) you select a  
> component on the palette and then click the form designer to "drop"  
> it. It will appear at a default size close to the location the mouse  
> was pointing (typically with the left most corner at the point of  
> click.)
>
> 2) Allow resizing and movement using the keyboard short-cuts?
>
> (Anyone who is using Delphi still and wants to shout at me for not  
> remembering *exactly* how it works, feel free to: I haven't touched  
> Delphi in over 2 years, and even then it was only to maintain legacy  
> code.)
>
> This would seem to solve the missing functionality (up to a point.)  
> I don't know how practical the implementation is; simply a suggestion!
>
> M