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by WorldMaker
3454 days ago
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«to review a .XML UI you need to apply patches, compile/build, play with it etc.» That's also assuming that you have an XML or designer friendly UI toolkit at all. A lot of Open Source is built with GUI toolkits that use essentially 100% code and don't have good designer-friendly tooling (because the programmers were busy scratching other needs first). That definitely narrows a lot of designer input to designers that also can code. A lot of people give Electron flak, but if there is one benefit to Electron becoming more common in the wild for open source projects, its the relatively much more designer friendliness of HTML/CSS(/SVG/etc) as opposed to classical C++ macros and duct tape UI toolkits. For that matter, and bringing things a bit more on topic, I'd think Inkscape could be a good application to "dogfood" their own tool and own code a bit further and build more of their UI/UX elements in SVG itself. (Maybe even in a way that others could piggy back off of for future applications.) |
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This is essentially the case with GTK+. Glade, though it has potential, is practically useless in it's current state. I've searched far and wide to find a mature project using it - so I can learn how to use it on the next level - and came up empty handed. There is no next level.
As far as it goes with GTK+, the only people designing UIs are programmers. It's all either hard coded in C or Vala (or sometimes C++), or defined in XML using tons of features that aren't implemented in Glade at all, and require an intimate knowledge of the GTK+ API.
As a free software enthusiast trying to work on a GTK+ application, I'll be the first to say, things could be (need to be) much better here! Beyond a couple trivial examples, the reference, and a couple dated books, documentation is extremely scarce. The tooling is incomplete, and it seems that the majority of people working in GTK+ have either grown used to working like this, or moved to another UI stack. Making GTK+ programming more accessible doesn't seem to be a priority (and adding more language bindings, or entirely new languages don't help nearly as much as a couple solid books on GTK+/GTKmm and a first class Glade would).
The only way to really learn the ropes seems to be by meticulously dissecting dozens of free software projects. No one will ever invest their time do this commercially when they can hit the ground running with Qt. It only seems remotely possible for stubborn people who write software as a hobby, and people who have matured to the point they can sell their knowledge. For a UX designer to end up here, they would have developed much more valuable skills in the process.