[Gpsbabel-misc] GUI platform musings

[Robert L. <rob...@us...>]

I've been a little out of pocket, so sorry for seeming quiet on all of
this. but here is bunch of responses all glommed together with blatant
disregard for attribution. But first a few meta-notes.

1) Please don't propogate mail with subjects containing the word 'spam'.

2) Most of this discussion is probably more appropriate for -code than -misc.
   I'm setting 'reply-to' on this message to there, so if you're not on that
   list and want to continue on developer topics, this would be a good time
   to join.

3) When a discussion changes course, please feel free to reset the thread
   references and subject.

> Sourceforge has some pretty annoying, recurring CVS problems. 

It comes in cycles.   This has been a particularly bad week for CVS on SF.
  http://sourceforge.net/docs/A04/

> We just need to create a frontend that calls main with the appropriate
> argc and argv, right?

Sort of. The various GUIS build a command line that, of course, results
in argc/argv population.

> Well, I hope I'm not duplicating any efforts here, but I started
> re-writing MacGPSBabel in RealBasic. I'm about 90% done and should

I'm not generally one to turn down help, but we've been on this
treadmill before. There are a bazillion different toolkits out there,
many of them somewhat expensive (RB looks to be beween $99 and $499 per
developer per platform - so I wouldn't expect a large developer base),
many of them have ugly external requirements (download this runtime
from...) and some of them have flaky licenses. (Qt looks like a lovely
product, but they change their licensing plan with the wind.) In fact,
that's been the biggest source of our GUI thrash - none of them get any
traction. Developer A writes something. Developer B rewrites it using a
different toolkit becuase he doesn't have Developer A's toolkit, doesn't
like it, or whatever. Developer B is the only one with access to that
toolkit (i.e. paid for it) and experience in it. Developer B leaves the
project for whatever reason. Now developer C starts from scratch yet
again.

Sorry if it sounds cycnical - especially since I don't have a solution -
but we've been through this a couple of times in this very project.

That said, I welcome any GUI wrappers that someone wants to write. I
think it's a fine contribution to the revolution. So I won't discourage
it, though I do find it odd that replacement is considered so much more
readily than repair.


> there should be a way that any new binary release includes all the
> necessary mac stuff to run out of the box, without having to hook it
> up to a separately compiled frontend. The

That's a mere packaging problem. Whether the developer is generating
one prograrm or two doesn't matter. It's *very* convenient for someone
without access to the toolkit to be able to sneak in new GPSBabel
executables. I do this very frequently. If a GSAK user or a Google Earth
user or a MacGPSBabel user or whatever reports a problem, I can send
them a new executable independently of the caller.

No, I don't really consider GSAK or GE to be mere wrappers for GPSBabel,
I was offering them as recognizable examples of similar functionality.

> like a frontend for requesting googlemaps to generate a route
> (manually wgetting the jsp is kind of a pain), and other commonly-
> done tasks (requesting a loc from geocaching.com, for example).

There are terms of use issues with building programmatic interfaces 
to build poor-mans web services that I'd like to avoid.

(As a user, though, I find it appealing! :-)


> Glade
> WxWidgets
> Java

I'll have to confess that I dismissed Java in the early years of
GPSBabel becuase I thought a 28MB runtime for a 30K program was just
weird. But from what I can tell, most people are likely to have
that runtime *anyway*, development tools are inexpensive/free, the
development base is large, and it is cross platform. So I have been
meaning to revisit the possibility of Java for a GUI. WxWidgets has a
lot going for it in terms of cost, portability, and license, but it
suffers from the small developer base problem.

> There is a Windows GUI of sorts, but it's horribly outdated and written

It's changed a lot since you last looked at it, Ron. Olaf's been putting
the smackdown on the Windows GUI. It's kind of slipped off the code
review radar because it's (taa daa) written in a toolkit that he has
experience with that nobody else on the list does. He's shown great
prowess and unending enthusiasm, so I let him run with it.

I didn't now that anybody ever noticed the Tcl front end.  I stamped it 
out as an example; I don't at all consider it useful.

> There's information in the vector tables that's intended to support
> that use (and, as far as I know, not exposed in any of the -^n output)

-^3 gets the lion's share of it. Olaf and Adam were both pounding on
their GUIs around the same time and needed many of the same things, so
we really widened that up recently.