8 ms·

It's a pity that (classic) VB's excellent Form Designer is tied to such an ugly language.

int_19h 9y ago
VB6's form designer (and UI framework that underlies it) has one crucial problem: it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window, or font size or family changes (even if it's something as simple as accommodating high DPI), or you localize the dialog and some strings become longer. This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.
- catnaroek 9y ago
  > it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some automation is fine (e.g., how MFC resizes views in response to their parent frame being resized) as long as simplicity isn't lost in the process (I'm looking at you, CSS).
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning. It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.
    - tluyben2 9y ago
      Are they? Most 'web apps' I use have a preferable browser size; if you use them at a smaller size they still work (they are responsive) but are just unusable for anything sane. So superior... I made those layouts with Delphi too early 90s and the same consistent behavior was true then as it is now; 99% (to not get 'source?' questions; I have been writing consumer software for almost 30 years and in my experience + the experience of peers I talk to) of consumer users of software click on maximize the first instance they open anything; browser or non browser. So sure, I use tiling window managers and like different windows, but most people don't, hence the success of tablets; they are simple because 1 app, maximized at a time. And those apps sure are responsive but they don't need to be; they look the same on all tablets for the resolution they were designed to be used at. Just simply scaling them would've worked fine for most people and usecases. You would have to write things twice; one for small screens (phones) and one for big screens (desktops) but that's not really that uncommon now either.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        Delphi was better in that regard, because you could anchor sides and corners of widgets to their containers. In many cases, it was sufficient to allow for a resizable layout. But it doesn't solve the problem with high DPI, changing fonts, and localized strings being sometimes significantly longer, requiring widgets to be resized to accommodate them.
        tluyben2 9y ago
        Agreed. And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or? When I click on some languages (I am not native English and my native language, Dutch, is not very high on the list of priorities for most companies) in some of the biggest companies in the world, you notice it just wasn't designed for that. From just making it wrap and enlarge to break the design to simple sticking outside the box. For some localizations (Chinese for one) you will have to redesign anyway because 'our' (not sure how to describe) designs simply do not work/sell over there. Most global companies have a local presence doing their local sites; I know some, even inside the EU, very big companies that have a site per country and have the html/css look 'the same-ish' for the user but completely different when you check the source to accomodate for local taste / language. I like the dream of this working, as I am a programmer, but I don't see it in real life and I find html/css just painful to work with; not difficult but painful compared to most desktop GUI tech. Flexbox etc is changing that a bit but still it looks like people are shoehorning everything in this html5 stuff just because they desperately not want to use/learn other things instead of using the best tool for the job. Disclaimer: I am old and have seen this before. I do create webapps and use React (new license makes it workable outside hobby projects), but I will gripe about it like the author of the blog post.
  - kingmanaz 9y ago
    >That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. Exactly. At least 90% of the functionality of my forms-based applications use nothing more than the standard UI components Tk provided in the early '90s. Why the web of 2017 still cannot grasp this is unfathomable. To be perfectly honest, I've never seen any toolkit match the productivity of Tcl's Tk of more than two decades ago, and it's even better today: http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/ http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/
  - int_19h 9y ago
    Again, "anything fancy" here includes something as simple as a localized dialog. In most commercial apps, this means pretty much everything would require "drawing it yourself". At which point you can basically throw the designer away, since you'll be writing code to manage layout for all widgets anyway.
    - catnaroek 9y ago
      > Again, "anything fancy" here includes something as simple as a localized dialog. In most commercial apps, this means pretty much everything would require "drawing it yourself". My day job is to implement a commercial ERP system that has never been and probably will never be localized. All software I use on a daily basis is English-only, even when localized versions to my native language exist, because: (0) The translations are absolutely horrible. Who in their right mind would think that they are actually “helpful”? (1) Even if the translations weren't horrible, the extra complexity simply isn't worth it. (Admittedly, my tolerance for system complexity is rather low compared to most other users.) So, from my point of view, when you talk about localization, you might as well introduce yourself as a visitor from a parallel universe (where localization is presumably useful).
    - mike_hearn 9y ago
      GUI toolkits moved on since the 1990's. Go download NetBeans and create a Swing UI in Matisse. You'll find these issues aren't an issue. You can drag/drop and end up with a flexible, responsive layout that can handle things like strings changing length due to localisation. You can do the same with Scene Builder for JavaFX, although it's not as slick as Matisse. Or even Glade, if you're more a UNIX person. The latter two tools require you to understand box packing but allow for a relatively responsive layout. The thing they don't do is let you totally change the layout depending on window size. But that's a fairly easy trick to pull off by just swapping out between different UI designs at runtime. There are widgets that can do this for you.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        I know that full well. But one thing that you might note about these tools that you've listed, is that they're nowhere near as simple as the VB6 form designer, that was exalted in the comment that started this whole thread. They're more complicated, because they have to deal with dynamic layouts, and you are exposed to this overhead even in visual mode.
- cm2187 9y ago
  I don't think anyone is advocating vb6 forms for today's tasks, it is a 30y old technology that hasn't been updated in 20y. But its simplicity and effectiveness was remarkable and should be considered a benchmark when designing new UI tools and technologies.
edwinyzh 9y ago
There are alternatives - https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ or Delphi.

VB6's form designer (and UI framework that underlies it) has one crucial problem: it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window, or font size or family changes (even if it's something as simple as accommodating high DPI), or you localize the dialog and some strings become longer. This lack of support for anything other than hardcoded absolute layout is exactly what made it so simple and easy to use. It's the equivalent of doing document layout by padding with spaces - it works for simple cases, and it's very easy to teach people, but it's a mess for anything even remotely complicated.

catnaroek 9y ago
> it has basically zero understanding of flexible layouts. That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. > As a result, things break as soon as you try to make an easily resizable window Au contraire! It is much easier to make a resizable window when you are in full control of how nested widgets are resized along with it. That being said, some automation is fine (e.g., how MFC resizes views in response to their parent frame being resized) as long as simplicity isn't lost in the process (I'm looking at you, CSS).
- pcwalton 9y ago
  CSS is incredibly simple if all you care about is absolute positioning. It's just that nobody wants to make a Win32 style app with absolute positioning on the Web. That's because responsive apps are superior to nonresizable, manually positioned UIs.
  - tluyben2 9y ago
    Are they? Most 'web apps' I use have a preferable browser size; if you use them at a smaller size they still work (they are responsive) but are just unusable for anything sane. So superior... I made those layouts with Delphi too early 90s and the same consistent behavior was true then as it is now; 99% (to not get 'source?' questions; I have been writing consumer software for almost 30 years and in my experience + the experience of peers I talk to) of consumer users of software click on maximize the first instance they open anything; browser or non browser. So sure, I use tiling window managers and like different windows, but most people don't, hence the success of tablets; they are simple because 1 app, maximized at a time. And those apps sure are responsive but they don't need to be; they look the same on all tablets for the resolution they were designed to be used at. Just simply scaling them would've worked fine for most people and usecases. You would have to write things twice; one for small screens (phones) and one for big screens (desktops) but that's not really that uncommon now either.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      Delphi was better in that regard, because you could anchor sides and corners of widgets to their containers. In many cases, it was sufficient to allow for a resizable layout. But it doesn't solve the problem with high DPI, changing fonts, and localized strings being sometimes significantly longer, requiring widgets to be resized to accommodate them.
      - tluyben2 9y ago
        Agreed. And yes, that needs some attention, but most people doing responsive web do not account for most of that either. What does changing fonts mean? You design something for a font and then change it afterwards or? When I click on some languages (I am not native English and my native language, Dutch, is not very high on the list of priorities for most companies) in some of the biggest companies in the world, you notice it just wasn't designed for that. From just making it wrap and enlarge to break the design to simple sticking outside the box. For some localizations (Chinese for one) you will have to redesign anyway because 'our' (not sure how to describe) designs simply do not work/sell over there. Most global companies have a local presence doing their local sites; I know some, even inside the EU, very big companies that have a site per country and have the html/css look 'the same-ish' for the user but completely different when you check the source to accomodate for local taste / language. I like the dream of this working, as I am a programmer, but I don't see it in real life and I find html/css just painful to work with; not difficult but painful compared to most desktop GUI tech. Flexbox etc is changing that a bit but still it looks like people are shoehorning everything in this html5 stuff just because they desperately not want to use/learn other things instead of using the best tool for the job. Disclaimer: I am old and have seen this before. I do create webapps and use React (new license makes it workable outside hobby projects), but I will gripe about it like the author of the blog post.
- kingmanaz 9y ago
  >That's largely a non-issue to me. If I need anything fancy, I'll draw it myself. The simple stuff ought to be simple. Exactly. At least 90% of the functionality of my forms-based applications use nothing more than the standard UI components Tk provided in the early '90s. Why the web of 2017 still cannot grasp this is unfathomable. To be perfectly honest, I've never seen any toolkit match the productivity of Tcl's Tk of more than two decades ago, and it's even better today: http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/ http://www.tkdocs.com/tutorial/
- int_19h 9y ago
  Again, "anything fancy" here includes something as simple as a localized dialog. In most commercial apps, this means pretty much everything would require "drawing it yourself". At which point you can basically throw the designer away, since you'll be writing code to manage layout for all widgets anyway.
  - catnaroek 9y ago
    > Again, "anything fancy" here includes something as simple as a localized dialog. In most commercial apps, this means pretty much everything would require "drawing it yourself". My day job is to implement a commercial ERP system that has never been and probably will never be localized. All software I use on a daily basis is English-only, even when localized versions to my native language exist, because: (0) The translations are absolutely horrible. Who in their right mind would think that they are actually “helpful”? (1) Even if the translations weren't horrible, the extra complexity simply isn't worth it. (Admittedly, my tolerance for system complexity is rather low compared to most other users.) So, from my point of view, when you talk about localization, you might as well introduce yourself as a visitor from a parallel universe (where localization is presumably useful).
  - mike_hearn 9y ago
    GUI toolkits moved on since the 1990's. Go download NetBeans and create a Swing UI in Matisse. You'll find these issues aren't an issue. You can drag/drop and end up with a flexible, responsive layout that can handle things like strings changing length due to localisation. You can do the same with Scene Builder for JavaFX, although it's not as slick as Matisse. Or even Glade, if you're more a UNIX person. The latter two tools require you to understand box packing but allow for a relatively responsive layout. The thing they don't do is let you totally change the layout depending on window size. But that's a fairly easy trick to pull off by just swapping out between different UI designs at runtime. There are widgets that can do this for you.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      I know that full well. But one thing that you might note about these tools that you've listed, is that they're nowhere near as simple as the VB6 form designer, that was exalted in the comment that started this whole thread. They're more complicated, because they have to deal with dynamic layouts, and you are exposed to this overhead even in visual mode.
cm2187 9y ago
I don't think anyone is advocating vb6 forms for today's tasks, it is a 30y old technology that hasn't been updated in 20y. But its simplicity and effectiveness was remarkable and should be considered a benchmark when designing new UI tools and technologies.

edwinyzh 9y ago

There are alternatives - https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ https://www.lazarus-ide.org/ or Delphi.