GUI Designer Usability: Am I Missing Something?
I have tried the last few EAP builds and I'm disappointed. The GUI Design experience is giving me the same frustrations that Microsoft Word's formatting does: a lot of experimentation is required to achieve the desired layout: add column here, delete row there, add vertical spacer, add horizontal spacer, merge cells, split cells.
I think that its going to be very hard to convince anybody who has used Matisse+GroupLayout or Apple's Interface Builder that Intellij's GUI Designer (in its current state) is better.
Am I missing something? Can the Intellij GUI Designer work like Matisse and provide freeform placement with alignment guidelines and preferred positioning cues somehow?
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I was also frustrated with the new GUI designer.
With a new one, it takes a lot of effort to lay out components and make the look as necessary.
Typically, I want to lay out components without any layot manager first ("XYLayout", as in former designer), to assess the layout, to have the first impression, and only after that to "make it right" - with layout manager
Former designer was really nice, the only drawback (for me) was that it could not use standard java layout managers. The new one can, but usability has gone. Not suitable for prototyping. I'm keeping the older version of idea just to use its UI designer.
Can we have two designers simultaneously? I would prefer old one, with properties like "want grow..", but capable of generating GridBagLayout!
maybe it's because i have only watched a 10 minute showcase of mantisse and used jformdesigner for about 2 hours, but i don't see huge differences.
i admit i do use the spacers,add row, delete row etc. features to finetune the gui, but that usually takes up 5% of the time
Message was edited by:
HamsterofDeath
The difference is like night and day. If you were to actually use Matisse (not watch a video of it) or get hands-on with Apple's InterfaceBuilder, you'd appreciate the difference. JetBrains need to do what Genuitec did with MyEclipse and incorporate Matisse, OR come up with something better.
They pretend they already have done.