[Bf-committers] layout engine

[David Bryant]

   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"