The more and more I develop with Laszlo, the less and less I feel that I need a graphical design tool. The existing components have enough appeal and flexibility that any application should look good and be useable without much design forethought. Of course this type of thinking would lead you to believe that all apps developed with Laszlo look the same without some advanced design tools. This of course is true for those of us who don't customize the components somewhat.
If your looking to get 'Flashy' it will be a painful process without graphical tools. But there already exists Flash ($$$)! Laszlo is more of a data driven application...I'm not finding enough reason and/or immediate demand for graphical tools except for those who are new to OL and acustomed to Flash. Flash also has an indepth data binding tools, but they confuse me to death and I find myself relieved at the simple approch Laszlo offers. Obviously on the flip side I can develop one hella good luk'n interface with Flash that I could never do in Laszlo. Anyhow: One trick I do when making interfaces is to have a button that creates a new window every time you click it. The window displays its own dimenions and position every time you change them. Now you can resize and reposition a 'pane' on the canvas in realtime. Write down the numbers and apply it to your code. This saves a lot of time with trial and error compiling...of course it only goes so far. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bob - Laszlo Sent: Friday, July 28, 2006 9:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Laszlo-user] Visual editor? On 07/26/06 16:33, Bret Schuhmacher wrote: > OK, I just downloaded everything and installed the Eclipse IDE, > thinking that it'd give me the ability to drag/drop UI components so I > could prototype quickly and then finish the backend code, but it > appears I was mistaken. Does OpenLaszlo have any kind of WYSIWYG editor available? > Even Thinlet has a couple of editors... OpenLaszlo looks so cool for > creating a rich client Internet app - I just can't believe there's no > drag/drop visual editor. Please don't take this as a slam against > OpenLaszlo - it looks *awesome*, but I'm a little daunted about the > text based layout, which I'll get used to if there aren't any tools. I had exactly the same experience. What do people use for doing the initial graphical design work? The docs recommend doing wire-frams and storyboards: http://www.laszlosystems.com/lps-3.3/docs/design/designers.html With what tools? It would be nice to find a graphical design tool that has widgets based upon the stock openlaszlo components, as found in the Components section of the OpenLaszlo Explorer: http://www.laszlosystems.com/lps-3.0/laszlo-explorer/ _______________________________________________ Laszlo-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-user _______________________________________________ Laszlo-user mailing list [email protected] http://www.openlaszlo.org/mailman/listinfo/laszlo-user
