[Bf-committers] layout engine
David Bryant
aceone at bellsouth.net
Tue Nov 27 20:45:30 CET 2007
For Blender to expand future features developers are going to need more
screen real estate.That mean a better GUI.The panels idea are great.I agree
that the coordinate system for buttons and such are all screwed up and the
button alignment code is a little weird but that can be fixed.Blenders UI
needs to employ scrolling interface boxes though if it's feature base is
going to expand.The problem with panels is that they work well in
horizontal and vertical screen layouts if they stay the standard size.But,if
you want to expand the UI features of a certain feature that you're
coding,you have to add another panel with the additional buttons for that
same feature.Soon you'll have 3 to 4 panels for options concerning only one
feature.Scrolling interface boxes will allow coders to expand their UI
interfaces within the same feature base and also give room for more feature
UI in the future since the UI will become more specialized and streamlined.
I tried to modify the panel code myself and the existing codebase would'nt
support such a modification.I needed it to improve my named layer interface
with anticipation of adding more layers to Blender.So, I looked into other
open source GUI kits to see if I could port.In my study of them all (you
name it I've looked at the code and features) GTK and Glade are the best
canidates for the job.The only caveat is that developers would have to work
on a release with the SOLE objective of porting the new GUI.
So, there you have it.Theres no getting around it.Other high end commercial
software developers have spent millions of dollars in research and
development to come to this conclusion.Sometimes, it's better to take
advantage of the gift you didn't have to pay for.
David Bryant
"Digikiller"
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