jmoiron.net

I am no GUI designer. I have new found respect for all of the people from whom I've consciously or unconsciously stolen the ideas that go into the screens coming up shortly. Actually, I always had respect for a well built program, but at this point I think I have more respect for poorly built programs: in order for them to get wherever they are, a lot of people had to think quite a bit.

I've gotten pretty used to QtDesigner; the only thing I'm not sure of at this point is if it will allow me to design the context menu's I want to make. I'm still undecided whether or not I want to add a toolbar to my program. Things that were annoying before have become almost second nature already; part of the designing thought process. Things seem more natural in Designer because it feels like you have more control over your widgets. In actuality, I think the container method of GTK+ is still superior because of its simplicity, power, and elegance; three things I value very much.

As I was working on some preliminary configuration screens, schizm said that they looked professional, which is really cool because he has an eye for things like this. Johnny said that Qt itself has become more professional; although I'm not sure that's true. I think KDE alienated a lot of people by choosing Keramik as the default; and themes like DotNET or Baghira which copy off of Microsoft and Apple, while looking nice, don't really give the user anything special. Maybe opinions will change when they migrate to Plastik.

Anyway, It took me about 6 hours, but I finally think I have it figured out. Turning an RC file into some settings dialogs is a lot harder than I thought. Here are some screenshots:

• The swaret general configuration screen... I think "slackware version" is too ambiguous or misleading, but I can't think of a better caption.. maybe I should add a tooltip?
• Configuring some stuff about packages
• Configuring the network options
• Configuring swaret servers for packages.. In the end it was merely coincidence that I ran out of space and realized that I should add another tab for these anyway
• Configuring dependencies this has some more server configuration, but I figured its easy enough to find here

I'm really concerned with usability on this, even though its something that probably only "root" should run (or it should run with "root" privileges). People say that free software developers don't try or don't care about polish, just about getting working software. I agree; its more important to me that this works rather than it looks nice: but at the same time, I want to have some pride in it. We'll see how things turn out; hopefully I can finish it before I get bored with it.