Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Location of QT-designer files for =?iso-8859-15?q?main=09window?=, sequence and notation editor

[Silvan <dmm...@us...>]

On Friday 15 April 2005 12:40 am, you wrote:

> - Is the use of qt-designer or kdevelop be used?

KDevelop doesn't really afford you any particular advantage with respect to 
GUI design.  It's more of a question of how you want to edit, compile, run, 
and debug the code.  I use vim for this purpose, like Rich.  We all have our 
favorite editor/environment, but KDevelop won't make designing a GUI the 
slightest bit easier.

For that, you want Designer.  You are definitely free to do that if you wish.

> - What produces better more managable code (designer or by hand)?

Designer produces crap code, but you can't edit it anyway, so it's largely 
irrelevant.  (For an example of how it all works, look at the Transport 
dialog.  gui/rosegardentransport*)

I think the answer to which to choose depends a great deal on what kind of 
person you are.  I think a fair test of that is:

You want to copy all the files that start with cri- and cra- from one 
directory to another.

Type A:
You open a file browser window for the source directory.  You open another 
browser window for the destination directory.  You shuffle them around on 
your desktop so that you have access to both.  You shift-click and ctrl-click 
on all the respective ranges of files to build up your selection, and then 
you drag the files from one window to another.

Type B:
You go to the handy dandy bash prompt and type:
	cd source_directory
	cp cri* cra* destination_directory

If you are Type A, you will probably like Designer.  It lets you pointy clicky 
your way out of having to learn all sorts of things.  However, once you use 
it, you're married to it.  You have to do things the Designer way from that 
point forward, and if you ever want to bypass all the pointy clicky stuffing 
things into boxes, you're SOL.  (You can divorce your code from Designer if 
you get sick of this, but it's a one-way process.  It's messy, and it yields 
ugly code.)

If you are Type B, then you will probably be glad you sucked it up and learned 
how to hand code.  I am definitely in the latter category, and I don't use 
Designer anymore.  It does make the initial phase of creating something from 
scratch easier, but I despise being married to it for the lifetime of the 
code.  I hate having to go stuff information into graphical widgets when I 
know that all I really need to do is change a couple of bytes in a text file.  
(I have been tempted to have it both ways by hand editing .ui files.  I DO 
NOT recommend this.  It's too easy to screw everything up.)

About all I do with Designer is use it to generate some spot example code when 
I have trouble figuring out what should inherit what to produce the results I 
want.  I'll go slap some widgets in a throwaway file and work from that, then 
adapt the generated code to my actual hand-coded work.

So anyway, that's the theory.  The final choice is up to you, really.  Write 
some baby stuff both ways and see what suits you.  We really don't care how 
you get there, as long as the final result fits in with the rest of the 
application.

Don't forget you can rip off KGuitar and anything else too.  It's Open Source 
baby.  That fretboard thing you want can probably be adapted from KGuitar 
without your having to reinvent the wheel.  Just make proper attributions in 
the comments for what you ripped off from what version of where, and it's all 
good.

We have collectively snagged bits and pieces of probably at least a dozen 
other applications in building this thing.  It's much easier to turn a wheel 
into a pulley than to create a pulley from scratch.  That's the key to this 
whole thing.

-- 
Michael McIntyre  ----   Silvan <dmm...@us...>
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek;  registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/