"Mike" wrote

| The best run test instrument project I ever saw
| started by writing the manual. They started
| with WHAT users wanted to do.
|

I think the smoothest piece of software I've written
is something I made for a friend, repeatedly going
back to watch her use it and see what she expected
it to do. That kind of feedback is a luxury. But it's
also important, for me at least, to actually be interested
in the functionality. The best software is the software
that the author needs themselves.
I think that with a lot of the geek products the
inspiration is not so much to make good software
but rather to perfect the algorythms. What should
be 2nd-stage polish is, instead, the only part
they're interested in working on.


| Yep, but I'd still like to hear about a free linux GUI development tool.
| With visual basic 6, you grab an icon, place it on the window.
| You have a box full of configurations you can do to that icon.
| It had EVERYTHING you could ever do to THAT icon...nothing more
| nothing less.
| When I tried that with C, I had to know everything and type it in
| CORRECTLY. Editing it was a bitch.
| Gambas looked promising, but never quite made it.
|
| Yes, I know VB6 ain't free, but the incremental cost of using it is zero
| if you already have it. And that's the crux of the difficulty migrating
| windows users to desktop linux.
|

Indeed. I'm still using VB6 and love it. That would
be painful to give up. And it's still as relevant as ever,
with support built into Win10.

I tried Gambas once. As near as I could tell it was
little more than a monument of resentment. The
author just wanted to tell VBers how bad VB is and
to condescend to us. I don't remember much about
the docs, but I do remember the author repeatedly
writing that his aim was to show us how to code
right. And the logo (a cartoon lobster?) was right out
of Fischer-Price.