Re: Fonts in .gorm files

[Marcus Müller]

On Wednesday, Jun 11, 2003, at 20:22 Europe/Berlin, David Ayers wrote:

> Gregory John Casamento wrote:
>
> > The current CVS version of Gorm and GUI support using default fonts.  
> > The user
> > can select if the system, user, menu or etc font should be used.  
> > This will
> > unarchive to the appropriate font on any given system.
> >
> > This functionality was added yesterday or the day before.
> Great! This is exactly what Gorm should do!
>
> >   Renaissance is not the only solution.
> Please don't take this personal.  Gorm is the right tool for certain 
> situations.  But Andreas asked for a guarantee, that the contents of 
> controls won't get clipped, no matter how large the system/menu/user 
> font is.  Gorm (nor IB) just cannot insure this.  This can be done 
> with Renaissance.

I wonder how those UI's will look if your system font is 100pt. ... 
Personally, I don't think that a box layout system is a guarantee for 
good looking UIs under all circumstances. Also, UI's done with box 
layout systems in my experience are way (much!) harder to design than 
with Interface Builder/Gorm - and usually even experienced UI designers 
had their troubles with it (I know it from Swing, personally). This is 
contrary to what most people do believe. Usually the argument is along 
the lines that because boxes are a clean and well structured approach 
it's much easier for programmers to design such UIs. Also, it seems to 
be widely believed, that programmers have no design skills and with box 
layout systems wouldn't be required to have such talent - so it's 
obviously a better approach. In my experience the constraints imposed 
by each box/layout styles have lots of subtle interactions that are at 
times very hard to understand - not to mention to solve. I've spent 
several hours solving issues in Swing that never occured to me in 
Interface Builder on OPENSTEP/Mac OS X. On the contrary, I never felt I 
could have designed something easier using a box layout system.

Interestingly, the whole problem is hard to notice at first, because 
box layout systems appear to be easier to understand as they are 
'cleaner' structured. Go design a complex UI with both approaches and 
see for yourself.

> That doesn't mean that Renaissance doesn't have other drawbacks.  
> (Like you don't get WYSIWYG layout.)  Choose the tool that best fits 
> your needs.

Gorm could be used as a WYSIWYG editor I think. How one would 
graphically handle the layout constraints imposed by the box layout 
system in Gorm is another question, though. It could be done similar to 
the way the 'guiders' work, but probably indicating 'destination boxes' 
instead.

There is one real advantage of Renaissance over Interface Builder/Gorm, 
however: Renaissance interfaces are truly cross platform.

Cheers,

  Marcus

--
Marcus Mueller  .  .  .  crack-admin/coder ;-)
Mulle kybernetiK  .  http://www.mulle-kybernetik.com
Current projects: finger znek@mulle-kybernetik.com