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I maintain a C++ app. Making the GUI, implementing the button callbacks, and writing the settings save/restore logic is all easy and boring compared to the sign

by ramchip 17y ago

I maintain a C++ app. Making the GUI, implementing the button callbacks, and writing the settings save/restore logic is all easy and boring compared to the signal and image processing core. But I can't possibly automate this, and I would be very happy to let a decent but less passionate or experienced, day-job coder do the GUI code while I take care of the more challenging parts. Even if I had to take more time teaching him than I would be doing it myself, I'd do it! More enjoyable and useful in the long-term.

weavejester 17y ago
I'm not sure I'd consider GUI design as easy and boring, just requiring a different set of skills to most programming work. Designing a good UI can be extremely difficult. I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. It seems to me that there are plenty of things interesting things you can do in a UI framework.
- ramchip 17y ago
  > I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. Because of C++ :) More seriously, it's the actual design of the options screen. Different variables are hooked to different controls, and I have to make sure that eg. when a frequency (in Hz) is loaded from the registry, it is converted to GHz and the control is set to the appropriate value. Little things like this. I use Qt which is very good and abstracts the actual registry/config file access, but it cannot guess things for me. GUI design isn't always easy and boring, but I work on physics data acquisition apps that have 2 or 3 users in total, so literally nobody cares about the UI as long as the experiment data is fine. It could take 10 minutes to figure out the controls and the user would still be happy. Physicists are used to making and using GUIs that would make you weep! In my case the GUI is a very easy to solve problem compared to the rest of the code. Of course things would be different if I made an app with millions of users, a web app, etc.

by ramchip 17y ago

weavejester 17y ago

I'm not sure I'd consider GUI design as easy and boring, just requiring a different set of skills to most programming work. Designing a good UI can be extremely difficult. I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. It seems to me that there are plenty of things interesting things you can do in a UI framework.

ramchip 17y ago
> I also don't understand why you can't automate things like saving and restoring settings. Because of C++ :) More seriously, it's the actual design of the options screen. Different variables are hooked to different controls, and I have to make sure that eg. when a frequency (in Hz) is loaded from the registry, it is converted to GHz and the control is set to the appropriate value. Little things like this. I use Qt which is very good and abstracts the actual registry/config file access, but it cannot guess things for me. GUI design isn't always easy and boring, but I work on physics data acquisition apps that have 2 or 3 users in total, so literally nobody cares about the UI as long as the experiment data is fine. It could take 10 minutes to figure out the controls and the user would still be happy. Physicists are used to making and using GUIs that would make you weep! In my case the GUI is a very easy to solve problem compared to the rest of the code. Of course things would be different if I made an app with millions of users, a web app, etc.