Tne new Mono GUI Designer “Stetic” have “reached the milestone of being not 100% useless” according to its developer. Flash video available.
First info about Mono’s Stetic, the new RAD tool
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Eugenia Loli
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stetic a RAD tool ?????
It’s written in Mono, and the example builds a Mono-based web browser, but (AFAIK) it just generates glade files that can be used with libglade. More appropriately, another Gtk+ RAD tool, along with Glade and Gazpacho.
No offense, but it appears to be a Glade clone. You have to plan the layout *before* adding your controls, unlike QT Designer or the Windows Forms designer. But if you like that, you can already use Glade with GTK#.
I wish someone would write a tool for Gtk like QT Designer. It’s so easy to use and the code it generates is so easy to work with. Create a window, save it into a file, use the UI compiler and derive from the class it generates! How easy is that?? I really don’t like working with Glade.
I use Visual Studio .Net on a daily basis and find glade to be only slightly slower to generate GUIs. When using libglade you have to setup the handlers yourself but after you know what your doing you can do it pretty quick. Horses for courses I guess. When I first started out doing win32 development there were no designers so I guess thats probably why I don’t find glade too unfriendly. Personally the thing I don’t like about .net is the ide managed code inside InitializeComponent and having duplicated stuff in a .resx file. On occasions they have got out of synch when using a version control system.
How is Glade different from that?
Not much, just giving my view on them.
Sorry, my question was directed to Mike.
Of course it looks like Glade… It’s supposed to be more or less an improved GUI builder (improved compared to Glade). There is no reason to change the box layout model, because it has proven extremely effective.
Stetic looks very interesting to me, as it does not just seem to improve the Glade UI (which is cumbersome at best) but also make it easier to create sane UIs with features like drag and drop with container resizing or automatic padding.
I have no problems with Glade (aside from it’s horrid UI), but some tasks can be tedious and repetitive, so any improvement would be welcome.
It’s good advertising this is.
The real fun will be when (if?) it gets integrated into MonoDevelop.
It is not a RAD, it is a simple GUI builder. Very nice, but IMHO the glade is better. But if anybody can integrate it with MonoDevelop, and when the monodevelop can support debugging, it can be a similar thing to RAD.
I agree, it’s not RAD, as some one said it’s a GUI builder. I wish there was an open source cross platform RAD tool like VS.Net or better still Delphi, both of these can be considered RAD tools because they integrate code generation with GUI building. I also notice that stetic appears to use layout managers which seems to be all the rage among java and open source folk. I hope they will also add the facility for the kind of approach used in Vs.Net and Delphi (also realBasic I believe).
Good to see a nice GUI builder for Mono. But a much higher importance should have a good IDE. One that handles code completion correctly and lets you easily navigate through your classes.
Monodevelop started very promising but it’s development has slowed down enormously (Just take a look at its development mailing list and read the posts regarding 0.6 or c#2.0 features). Currently it’s almost completely annoying (Try editing a aspx page…)
There were some screenshots showing KDevelop with c# support but I haven’t heared any news for that either.
As far as I’m concerned I’ll stick with java / eclipse and enjoy a real good functional IDE.
If you had read on stetic before posting “how’s different from glade” messages you’d know it’s a very alpha level program (written in a couple of weeks, i reckon), and already does most of the things glade does, plus it supports drag and drop editing.
Did you notice in the flash example when he drops buttons in the upper vbox? No manual vbox editing involved, it just works (as opposed to glade2). For an app that is in its pre-alpha stage it’s not really that bad, is it?
As for the comment about having already designed the UI before placing the widgets… I honestly hope you do it whatever gui tool you use! Dropping widgets on an absolute positioning canvas is the quickest path to the horrid UIs VB programs have most of the time…
I think the idea is to integrate it with monodevelop…
Regarding MonoDevelop its development was sort of stalled for a bit, but it is ramping up lately.
A 0.6 release will be coming soon that will fix most known code completion issues. In svn for post 0.6, we already have a completely managed dock and a rewritten solution and class pad. Also, the usual round of bug-fixing by volunteers.
I’m not sure what your complaint is about C# 2 features, but they will be done. It will just take a while, I am looking into it.
ASP.NET is not a priority for me, but others have expressed interest in adding support for it.