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developing: adjusting UI using RAD?

Asked by pbhj

I'd like to have a go at hacking on the "align" panel / dialog to reduce the whitespace and use smaller icons. If someone could give me a little primer. I've got the SVN source and can compile, I'm fine scanning through the code and can usually find where stuff is done - but any programming skills I had left me when I started using PHP (lol!).

I've used GUI development tools before, I'm just not sure which to use and how to tie it in with the SVN code .. is their a primer on this or can someone point me to some reading - whoever actually developed the panels, what app did they use, something like QTdesigner presumably?

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Jon A. Cruz
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Alexandre Prokoudine (alexandre-prokoudine) said : 		#1

Hi. We do not use any RAD tool. Everything is done manually. It's sort of old-fashioned and leads to misalignments like in 'Export bitmap' dialog, but it works :)

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pbhj (pbhj) said : 		#2

So I'd need to adjust the icon file for the align dialog and then set the icon locations individually hard coded in?

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Best Jon A. Cruz (jon-joncruz) said : 		#3

The main problem with designer tools is that they tend to create verbose results that work in some situations but are not very flexible. We're trying to avoid things like physical placement and instead stick with logical, etc.

Also... things like reducing whitespace are *very* tricky to get right when one considers multiple theme sizes, different OS's, etc.

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pbhj (pbhj) said : 		#4

Thanks Jon A. Cruz, that solved my question.

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pbhj (pbhj) said : 		#5

Panelised buttons has to be a solved problem though?

There's got to be another project where they've pinnable panels with configurable buttons, etc..

I do have some UI training, I wasn't really proposing to roll out changes, I was thinking that if a UI builder was in use that I could quickly shuffle the buttons around before I ran my next SVN compile and see how I liked things, proposals to push those changes to other users would be a long way off.

One last thing, which file/files control the button placement - thanks for taking the time to answer.