Are designer tools evil for programming?

michaelinux · 10-06-2011, 08:18 PM

In college they teach you to use designer tools to make GUIs and of course a little bit of the code that is behind all that, but I've always wondered, in real life like in a real project, what happens if i don't know the code to create some stuff that a designer could do for you? I'm still studying and i haven't got a job yet, so a lot of questions come to my mind when i think what is working as a programmer like?.
maybe is just my paranoia...

TobiSGD · 10-06-2011, 10:51 PM

Of course knowing the code behind the GUI is a good thing, but I don't see the problem in using the tools, if you know that already. It speeds up the GUI creation and is a more intuitive way of putting the GUI together.

dugan · 10-06-2011, 11:55 PM

Depends on how good the "designer" is. A lot of Qt and KDE projects use Qt Creator's UI designer, for example, and a lot of WPF developers use Expression Blend.

SigTerm · 10-07-2011, 05:00 AM

If a tool is optional and can save you hours of development time per project, it is good (Qt UI designer).

If a tool is not optional, hides important technical details (like build process) from you and you can't work without it, then it is bad.

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelinux

but I've always wondered, in real life like in a real project, what happens if i don't know the code to create some stuff that a designer could do for you?

It means you're inexperienced or a bad programmer. You should know how to achieve same result without the tool. With Qt you can always create same GUI with or without GUI designer.

MTK358 · 10-07-2011, 08:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelinux

In college they teach you to use designer tools to make GUIs and of course a little bit of the code that is behind all that, but I've always wondered, in real life like in a real project, what happens if i don't know the code to create some stuff that a designer could do for you? I'm still studying and i haven't got a job yet, so a lot of questions come to my mind when i think what is working as a programmer like?.
maybe is just my paranoia...

They're only "evil" if you use them to avoid learining about how to make UIs in code. If you understand how the code works, it's a helpful tool that makes it much easier and faster to create and edit UIs.

theNbomr · 10-07-2011, 09:47 AM

They're also a PITA if you cannot roll in manual edits to the generated code. If you use a GUI designer to build an interface, then hand tweak things to add functionality that the designer cannot do, you often end up with a product which cannot be edited in the GUI designer without losing your manual edits. That, I find very aggravating, and for that reason, the designer tools I've used generally get treated as a way to build the initial framework, and then are discarded for the rest of the project. Part of that is no doubt my own ignorance of the tool, but sometimes not.

--- rod.