Re: Yet another GUI Builder for Octave

[marcalexandre]

Wow,
I see a lot of interest for this project.
So first of all, sorry the my late response.

@John Eaton,
In fact, it's where I really want to go with this project. Modify Glade to
directly support Octave as it is an open source GUI builder.
For the moment, I just took little time to see if the first idea was doable.
I think at the moment, I will continue to push this way, I mean parsing
glade files (adding support of uipanels and uibuttongroups) as it is less
complicated, before switching to modifying Glade. Being able to modify Glade
could pave the way for something even greater, a block diagram environment
for model-based design (as you can find in over non-free tools). But that's
another story.

@John Swensen,
I also though about that but didn't find documents about .fig files. I got a
look at the link you gave above and also loaded some .fig files and that
sounds great.
I think the approach I adopt (*_gui.m for GUI creation and *.m for
callbacks) is quite the same as the Matlab approach with the .fig file
equivalent to the *_gui.m file). But I recognize that being able to read
.fig files will definitely increase Matlab Compatibility even if the
approach I used is also Matlab compatible. I am not a Qt expert so I would
consider adding .fig files import/export. Great idea and very useful link
through.

@Mike Miller,
Yes that could also be great. It will leave the user the freedom to use his
preferred GUI Builder.
I didn't have a look at Qt ui syntax yet, but in that sens, the idea could
be to create a kind of "correspondence table" associating Qt, Glade or
whatever GUI Builder syntax keywords to the corresponding Octave ui*
function.
Thanks also for your explanations about shared variables. I still think that
for callbacks, we are not obliged to use nested functions. Sub-functions
also work great. Am I wrong or missing something ?

@Andreas Weber, @NJank
I think the main complexity of this approach is that it's a lot of work to
do to create the interface of the Builder, manage widgets drag & drop, get
the position of the widget on the frame, etc. I am not an Octave expert, I
mean I don't know how Octave really work deeply underhood, so maybe it's not
so complicated as I think. Have you already got an idea about how to manage
all these stuffs ?
Now regarding Glade, the main reason I chose it, is that it is available on
all operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac). Windows and Mac versions are
not the newest ones, but work great. In fact, I use Glade for windows to
test my idea. It is a very small software (~16 MB) and is installed very
quickly on Win without any requirements.

---
If many people are interested in, maybe we could work together to define a
right way to do it. Then create a project and work on it as, in my opinion,
it could be a major addition to Octave and could increase compatibility with
Matlab as well as attractiveness.
I will share the code no latter than the end of this week through the link
given by Lachlan.

Cheers,

Marc Alexandre K.



--
View this message in context: 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Yet-another-GUI-Builder-for-Octave-tp4678450p4678541.html
Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.