Poll: UI Designer new features
Hello everyone,
As we're building the plan for Demetra, we'd like to request community feedback
on the major new UI Designer features that you consider the most useful.
If you had 20 votes, how would you spread them between features in the following
list (in no particular order)?
- Swing menu designer
- Run-time loading of .form files
- SWT support
- Reverse-engineering support (import Java code to .form file)
- Possibility to create and navigate to event handlers
- Support for non-visual components (possibility to drop any class to a form
and to set its properties in the designer)
- MIDlet form designer
- API for plugging custom components and component containers
- UI inspections (including automatic checking for UI guideline compliance)
- Support for nested forms and/or form inheritance
You may also add other features to the list if desired. Note that you don't
need to vote for removal of forms_rt dependency, complete support for all
Swing components and component features, and lots of usability improvements.
They'll be there whether you vote for them or not. :)
--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
请先登录再写评论。
http://jformdesigner.com/
Ahmed.
Hello Dmitry,
DK> Funny :) I try to search for advertised JFormDesigner and
DK> http://www.google.com.ua/search?hl=en&q=JFromDesigner&btnG=Google+Se
DK> arch points to this thread :)
That's because the product is named JFormDesigner, not JFromDesigner.
(JFromDesigner sounds like a cool applet for designing the visual appearance
of the "From" field in the messages you send... interesting how much demand
such a tool would have. :) )
--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
Ahmed, I do not doubt that you can argue and I have read your statements
before. I just wanted to state that there are still users who can and
want to use the designer.
It makes no sense if you always blame on that. You have your opinion, I
respect this. As I already said, I believe jetbrain will have their own,
and I hope it is as good as the current one - just kidding ;)
Help to make it good and try to abstract what a good designer is. ;)
Thomas
PS: Of course I like chocolate too, so come on jetbrains and feed us.
I have just purchased JFormDesigner and have fell in love with it. It looks and acts like you guys created it. You should really work with the guy who developed it to at least create a plug-in for IntelliJ if not just make the product your default GUI layout tool.
Hello Pete,
PH> I have just purchased JFormDesigner and have fell in love with it.
PH> It looks and acts like you guys created it. You should really work
PH> with the guy who developed it to at least create a plug-in for
PH> IntelliJ if not just make the product your default GUI layout tool.
We are working on improving our own UI designer, and we do not have any plans
to make JFormDesigner a part of IDEA. If the JFormDesigner developers need
any help with creating a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA, we'll be happy to provide
that, but so far we haven't receive any requests for such help.
We do agree that JFormDesigner is a great tool, so the quality bar for our
own work is set pretty high. And I hope you won't be disappointed with the
result of our work.
--
Dmitry Jemerov
Software Developer
JetBrains, Inc.
http://www.jetbrains.com
"Develop with pleasure!"
Thanks for the reply. I look forward to trying your tool soon.
-Pete
On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:47:44 -0800, Dmitry Jemerov <yole@jetbrains.com>
wrote:
>
>
>
>
--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
teehee
>> Hello Pete,
>>
>> PH> I have just purchased JFormDesigner and have fell in love with
>> it.
>>
>> PH> It looks and acts like you guys created it. You should really
>> work
>>
>> PH> with the guy who developed it to at least create a plug-in for
>> PH> IntelliJ if not just make the product your default GUI layout
>> tool
>>
>> We are working on improving our own UI designer, and we do not have
>> an
>>
>> plans to make JFormDesigner a part of IDEA. If the JFormDesigner
>>
>> developers need any help with creating a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA,
>> we'
>>
>> be happy to provide that, but so far we haven't receive any requests
>> f
>>
>> such help.
>>
>> We do agree that JFormDesigner is a great tool, so the quality bar
>> for
>>
>> our own work is set pretty high. And I hope you won't be disappointed
>>
>> with the result of our work.
>>
:)
Whoops, just got that. My bad.
On Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:02:03 -0800, Scott Curtis <scurtis@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks for the reply. I look forward to trying your tool soon.
>
>
>> -Pete
>> On Mon, 12 Dec 2005 01:47:44 -0800, Dmitry Jemerov
>> <yole@jetbrains.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Pete,
>>> PH> I have just purchased JFormDesigner and have fell in love with
>>> it.
>>> PH> It looks and acts like you guys created it. You should really
>>> work
>>> PH> with the guy who developed it to at least create a plug-in for
>>> PH> IntelliJ if not just make the product your default GUI layout
>>> tool
>>>
>> .
>>
>>> We are working on improving our own UI designer, and we do not have
>>> an
>>>
>> y
>>
>>> plans to make JFormDesigner a part of IDEA. If the JFormDesigner
>>> developers need any help with creating a plugin for IntelliJ IDEA,
>>> we'
>>>
>> ll
>>
>>> be happy to provide that, but so far we haven't receive any requests
>>> f
>>>
>> or
>>
>>> such help.
>>> We do agree that JFormDesigner is a great tool, so the quality bar
>>> for
>>> our own work is set pretty high. And I hope you won't be disappointed
>>> with the result of our work.
>>>
>
>
--
Using M2, Opera's revolutionary e-mail client: http://www.opera.com/m2/
Yes
Don't really care, but it would be nice.
I dont' care very much, but I could see how this might be useful from a jetbrains perspective.
Nope -- I don't see this as being useful. Unless you h ave the "just picked up 200,000 lines of code where they original author's were hit by a bus" problem, I don't see this being used. People who code GUI's are not going to use a GUI designer. You are after application coders who want to branch into GUI's without having to learn all the delicate crap that goes with swing.
I think so, yes.
What would be the use case? I don't see you guys going after the VB application market with this. The "business guy" who wants to play engineer by draging and dropping his way to an application isn't going to use this product.
Not sure what this is.
Absolutely. (I see this as very important) (see below for more detail).
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Hopefully it's not too late, but here's my list:
In order to understand what you guys are doing, I would think we'd need to understand the market. Who are we going after?
I see it like this:
Light business users (e.g. VB type people) aren't going to use IDEA.
Heavy Java folks who preach the wonders of the language probabaly aren't even going to use IDEA, much less the GUI builder. They will have the opinion that they can do it better themselves. These people's father's were the ones hand-coding assembly language when fortran came out and they were convinced it was worth it to squeeze another 1% of performance.
The folks that are most likely to pick up the GUI builder are competent java programmers who have big systems, where the UI is of lesser importance on the project. On my project 80% of our bugs are in the business logic. When we have deep swing problems, we hate it. It diving into crap that sun produced that sucks real bad, and we would rather not have to do that.
Especially layout managers.
That's where I see the beauty of the product.
I've got this block of code (or perhaps this idea), and I want to put together a UI to take adantage of it. I want the UI to be slick, well-put together, and I want to do it quickly without having to invest a lot of time.
So I see the following this as useful to that end:
- Enforce design standards. (the inspections mentioned previously)
- Be able to create and deploy templates for certain types of screens. For example, A common metaphore is the collection (with a table) where I can manipulate the contents of a collection, futz with the columns and rows, and double-clicking on a row gets me to a next-level window where I can "do stuff"
Why do I have to lay out this metaphor over and over again. I'm tired of it. Can't IDEA just generate it for me?
- Custom widgets and containers. Eventually I need to do something complex. I'm going to do it by hand. Perhaps I picked it up from someone else, or perhaps I took the time.
- Frame support. I don't understand why IDEA just doesn't allow us to build frames. I still end up having to code the frame by hand. Not a big deal, but it is supposed to be a GUI builder, afterall.
Anyway -- The point is think along the lines of the developer, reasonably competent, not a lot of patience for details in the UI (would rather be back in the domain). How can we make that person's life really really easy.
Perhaps it's similar to how Rails makes it really really easy for Ruby to integrate into databases. Ruby developers don't have to worry about it (as much).
Mike