|
Does anyone actually like creating screens/user interfaces?
I wish I had someone to delegate this to. I wrote some fantastic supporting code to make all the screens look pretty, with an easy(ish) to use API (given its complexity and large featureset) - that doesn't mean I want to have to use it myself! 
It's a slog, making screens. Just rote code and very little problem solving or creativity.
It's times like this that make me eager to move on to my next project.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
|
But can it do IoT? =)
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
UWP works on RaspberryPi! I mean might depend on OS installed.. but last year I was working, amongst other thing, on a UWP UI on a solar inverter! 
|
|
|
|
|
A raspberry pi will run linux and mono.
I'm not at all surprised it runs UWP.
It's not an IoT device. It's a low end computer in a small form factor.
As soon as you connect it to batteries, that point will be driven home.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
It's drudgery for sure. Gotta do it though.
|
|
|
|
|
I built my own JSON based UI manager that can handle all my UI elements plus wrap any other control, and then built a graphical form designer for it. Form editor allows me to draw and then drop back to JSON when I need to. Problem solved. It’s a dream to use 
|
|
|
|
|
Yeah, I can't really do that in 300kB of primary ram and 4MB of 80mhz secondary ram on a CPU @ 240mhz attached at 20mhz to an 800x480 display. There's very little room for any niceties. I do support True Type on it though.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
Reminds me when I worked on a WYSIWYG emulator app for HP LaserJet printers. This was back in the old DOS days (the original IBM PCs had just came out a few years earlier) and was written in assembler as a .COM app. I developed the user interface similar to Lotus-123. Was actually fun and something I still remember with a bit of pride...
|
|
|
|
|
About 40 years ago I wrote a full screen text editor with word wrapping that ran in 8kb of RAM (about 7K of code and 1k of data) and could handle editing large files by windowing through them (it used a second temp file to manage the data it couldn't keep in memory, with a stack algorithm to keep it fast). Oh, and it was all hand coded assembly (I also wrote one in BASIC to run on the same hardware, but it was more restrictive and had to page code in and out).
It should be 'easy' to write a dynamic screen layout system in 300k, as long as you apply appropriate restrictions (e.g., no 1MB GIFs)
|
|
|
|
|
A simple layout engine i could do given the time.
This isn't really about that though. See the rest of the thread.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
Never worked on GUIs but figured it would be as you described.
|
|
|
|
|
Same here. Spent 40+ years as an embedded engineer and the only project that had a UI (built in web server) was cancelled before it was finished. The web UI part of the project was being handled by another engineer.
|
|
|
|
|
I've enjoyed making UI in WinForms, WPF, UWP, and Ios over the years. MFC, Android, and HTML OTOH are ![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) ing hell.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
|
|
|
|
|
It can be a grind, but I'm actually enjoying Angular at the moment. There are plenty of interesting and challenging parts. Typescript, CSS, etc.
|
|
|
|
|
Yeah, I like the idea of typescript but I can't make heads or tails of angular and similar frameworks, with all their "routing" and stuff. It confuses me.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
Angular does have a lot of set up, but it's not too bad once you get the hang of it.
The lexical parsing and other things you do hurt my brain...
|
|
|
|
|
I swear that stuff only looks difficult because I'm the one teaching it. If it was truly difficult, I wouldn't be able to make anything of it either.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
I think some brains are just wired in a way that they can make sense of certain things (math, parsers, etc.) easier than others can
|
|
|
|
|
and others can understand Angular.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
You must not be using MVVM. If you were, a visual designer would show up to do the visuals for you.
It was only in wine that he laid down no limit for himself, but he did not allow himself to be confused by it.
― Confucian Analects: Rules of Confucius about his food
|
|
|
|
|
Yeah, you don't get visual designers with these particular MCUs and frameworks. Nor a lot of RAM. Nor a lot of CPU.
It's not like desktop or web development.
Real programmers use butterflies
|
|
|
|
|
honey the codewitch wrote: Does anyone actually like creating screens/user interfaces?
It's a slog, making screens. Just rote code and very little problem solving or creativity.
I'll try not to take your comments personally.
I've spent the last 20 years at my current employer doing the user interfaces and installers for our line of commercial ink-jet printing systems[^]. Our older products used C++/MFC, and our current ones C#/WPF.
I genuinely enjoy what I do. The challenge comes in making the product's features available to the user in a way that they can easily discover and understand. WPF provides wonderful tools for making articulate, capable UI's in a fairly short amount of time. Our UI's are heavily graphical since they are acting as the control panel for a complicated piece of machinery.
That said, the "screen stuff" that others in this thread have derided actually isn't as much of my job as you might think. My UI applications are multithreaded out the wazoo. They communicate with one or more Windows services that handle hardware control. We have external interfaces for control from customer workflow equipment. There's a substantial data management facet to things, keeping track of the machine configuration and setup. A major part of my job is to insulate the user as much as possible from timing and other dependencies imposed by the hardware.
I acquired this part of my team's workload by default. Nobody else wanted to do it, which seems to correspond with the prevailing view in this thread.
In my view, both the "screen stuff" and the underlying application require significant creativity and skill. The creativity comes from considering the user, the foremost priority when designing a user interface. Skill comes from mapping that consideration onto your product features flexibly and efficiently. I gain significant satisfaction from doing both.
Software Zen: delete this;
|
|
|
|
|
Quote: The creativity comes from considering the user, the foremost priority when designing a user interface.
When I have said this very sentiment to people in the past, I very often receive head-tilted, forehead scrunched, incredulity in response.
I would make one caveat, however. The same sentiment applies to everything else in software. Even to the point of having empathy current and future colleagues who may come later to repair or extend one's work.
Empathy is a highly underrated character asset.
Just my opinion, of course.
Cheers,
Mike Fidler
"I intend to live forever - so far, so good." Steven Wright
"I almost had a psychic girlfriend but she left me before we met." Also Steven Wright
"I'm addicted to placebos. I could quit, but it wouldn't matter." Steven Wright yet again.
|
|
|
|
|
Graphical UIs (not UIs in general, CLIs can often be hacked together easily which would explain why most CLI tools out there require arcane knowledge & a goat every now and then to use properly) are somewhat of a pain indeed.
I came to regard that good old 80/20 rule as "you spent 20% of the work on actual functionality, 80% of the myriad UI details".
Well, it really depends on how you regard the situation. When you're supposed to ship a product to end-users, then the GUI is indeed a crucial product feature. And it's not like doing GUI work sucked by default, it's just that it's a whole different kind of work from that algorithmic back-end work.
However, I very much disagree on "little problem solving and complexity". Granted, that heavily depends on the product in question but I gotta say, the GUIs I'm working on require quite a lot of problem solving due to complex & (optionally) interconnected workflows the product is supposed to allow. The stuff I'm doing is not mundane dilligence-first creativity-never. And quite frankly, the moment there's no creativity involved, I'd write a GUI generator which takes my back-end data structures and just plops auto-generated GUIs on top of them.
The biggest problem, aside from GUI being a whole different way to think (to, let's say, churning data in back-end), is the reliance on the product manager. As I said, the stuff I'm working on does a lot of (complex) things. That means that a dude talking to the users of this piece, discussing how the GUI could be set up to serve their needs, is invaluable. I sooooo wouldn't want to sit in customer seminars, let alone talking with customers! Who would apparently rather kill themselves, than say CLEARLY what they mean.
So far, so good. The problem is, this dude isn't a developer. Meaning he doesn't quite get the concept of "If we talk about what we want in advance, this whole thing would take 1 week. If you keep on dropping tiny tidbits you want to have added after I'm basically done, it'll take a month." but I'm still glad to have him. And I think, such culture clashes are manageable. Meaning after I got proactive about suggesting potential extension points, defining by myself which kinds of changes could be dropped at which stage of that particular GUI development, things really got better.
But yeah, if the GUIs I was doing required no problem-solving/creativity, I'd just automate the sh*t out of GUI building and call it a day.
|
|
|
|
General 
News 
Suggestion 
Question 
Bug 
Answer 
Joke 
Praise 
Rant 
Admin 
Submit an article or tip
) can often make things easy again! 
