KWWidgets/Projects/UIDesigner/PreviousWork/ComparisonCriteriaList

List of basic widgets

This section should list all the basic widgets proposed by the designer, like radio-buttons, checkboxes, simple buttons, labels, top-level windows, dialog boxes, layout controllers, and others. The list should be as extensive as possible, taking in account the differences there might exist between versions of a certain designer --only ONE version per designer will be studied--.

List of additionnal widgets

This section should list *all* the basic widgets proposed by the designer --*all* because of version differences--. These widgets depends on the purpose of the project being generated. For instance in glade you can have gtk+ additional widgets and/or GNOME widgets.

Disposition of tools in the environment and the environment itself

This section should describe:

how the environment is presented to the user, multiple detached windows like glade or MDI like Qt-Designer or Visual Studio

has the user the possibilty to create applications/dialog boxes/composite widgets based on templates/wizards

when/where is the "working canvas", the area where the user can manipulate the widgets.

how/where/when the available widgets are display. How to select them and add them to a "working canvas".

support for standard user interaction, like copy/paste, undo, drag-and-drop, keyboard shortcuts

can one copy/paste attributes from one widget to another, do attributes remain intact

what are the different editing modes :

is there a real-time preview mode

where/how can one change attributes of the widgets

where/how/when can one change the layout/position/tab order of a widget

where/how can one specify different responses to windowing/interaction events, clicks, resizes, font changes, can the user personalize the code for these events.

is there multi-language support

how/where can the user specify/manipulate project resources like bitmaps, callback tables, etc

what is the convention for variables names/values and properties.

can one display the widgets' tree

are there visual aids for the user, like tooltips, information on a status bar, on-line help, documentation, how useful/explanatory are these aids

can one generate code from within the application, can one generate an XML interface description, what are the supported languages/libraries one can export to, is there a possibility to add plugins/use other applications for code generation

screenshots under different platforms

what future improvements/changes are foreseen

Using the designer

This section will describe the process of creating a single user interface from within different designers and writing down comments on its utilization. For this task only common widgets will be used to maintain a certain coherence in the comparisons. Close attention will be payed to :

time spent

facility to use the tools, layout widgets, specify/change attributes

limitations, like text capacity, windowing/user triggered events not supported

can one edit the XML by hand and reload it successfully

are there any additional libraries/software dependencies that must be met to install/use the designer

what is the technique to incorporate generated code into other projects