Re: [avrdude-dev] Re: About avrdude-gui

[Joerg Wunsch]

As Bernhard Walle wrote:

> > Also, it's kinda fat, and IIRC, Jörg argument was that it's
> > missing a decent interface builder.

> Well, there's Glade. But I don't know much about the quality.

I think Joerg once looked at it, and found it poor compared to the
things he was used to (mainly from the Borland side though).

> But as far as I know fltk doesn't support Unicode and anti-aliased
> fonts (fontconfig, Xft). If I look on htmldoc, that's sure not the
> kind of interface I expect on a modern computer.

Well, Unicode has a point if we really think someone is going to
internationalize avrdude some day.  OTOH, as the AVR datasheets come
only in English, you could expect about any engineer programming AVRs
to have at least a basic understanding of technical English.  I think
even AVR Studio comes only in English, doesn't it?

About anti-aliased fonts in menues, it's really a matter of an
opinion.  I absolutely hate them, I want clear, sharp fonts in menues
(and I know of a number of other people who think the same).  For
gtk2, it's been my first action to turn off anti-aliasing (btw., how
does one do that for Qt?).  Font anti-aliasing makes sense for
scalable text documents but not for a GUI.  So this might even be a
point for fltk. ;-)

> I think the current GUI is built with Qt, I don't know what's wrong
> with this.

avrdude-gui is currently built with wxWidgets.  IIRC, they use Gtk as
a backend.  One major drawback of that approach (in addition to being
rather fat) is that the interface builder was only available for
Win32.  That was acceptable for avrdude-gui being a standalone
project, but would no longer be suitable for an integration with
avrdude.  Also, I think it left out MacOS though again, no idea about
MacOS X -- if they have an X11 emulation, it's probably a matter
whether it is always available or not.

> Qt 4 is GPL for Windows, too, runs with MacOS, is widely spread on
> Linux, comes with a good interface builder ...

For Qt, see above, where's the knob to turn off anti-aliasing?

By now, Qt has never really been considered due to their licensing
policy.  It's news to me they went GPL now even for Win32.

-- 
cheers, J"org               .-.-.   --... ...--   -.. .  DL8DTL

http://www.sax.de/~joerg/                        NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)