New Drag & Drop support in 3.15 development series:
First of all I would like to thanks once again to the foundation for sponsoring my trip to Brussels to attend the Developer Experience Hackhest and Alberto for inviting me in the first place!
After the hackfest we all agreed that Glade needs some love to make it more newbie friendly, nothing we did not already knew, but please do not move along Glade needs your help!
On of the thing that new people find the most difficult to understand about creating GUI with Gtk+/Glade is the container packing paradigm which is very powerful once you get used to it but not as intuitive as one would like.
A way to improve this situation would be to create a new free form layout container similar to Java’s GroupLayout as suggested by Alex in this mail which of course is a lot of work specially in Glade so… help and/or sponsorship is welcome!!
But for now being able to drag & drop widgets around should make thinks easier, right?
[vimeo width=”640″ height=”400″]https://vimeo.com/60841071[/vimeo]
The next thing we want to address is the property editor. Not only does not look good (In its defense the whole thing is autogenerated) but thanks to wide screen displays being ubiquitous nowadays it is wasting some precious vertical space :S
This is how it currently looks like
So… to save some vertical space and make it look more modern this are the changes I made
- New ATK icon
- Replaced toggle buttons with switches
- Fields do not expand by default
- Replaced text field edit button with an entry edit icon
- Removed class field title
- Moved clear and help buttons to the top of the notebook
The last item is definitely not definitive since it might make more sense to move it inside the scrolled window or simply to the toolbar.
As you can see there is lot of room for improvement so if you come up with a good idea help us!