Home/ Questions/Q 8773021
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-13T18:11:15+00:00

I am blind, and I have trouble making nice looking guis. This really frustrates

  • 0

I am blind, and I have trouble making nice looking guis. This really frustrates me because while I am a capable developer, I cannot complete projects on my own because I am unable to make the front-end. I am wondering if any of you know of some automatic solution which produces professional looking guis? They don’t have to be fancy, most of the time we are talking about basic forms/wizzard style layouts. I basically need to get away from specifying pixel heights, widths, and positions. I need something that figures out how to make things match in terms of sizes and positions in relation to one another, resize well, etc. My primary target platform is Windows. I have worked with WxWidgets before and have been very satisfied, but I needed to hire another person to do the design which I cannot keep doing longterm. I have no problem writing code, I just am not able to effectively figure out how to position and set the size for controls on the form.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I doubt there could ever be a perfect substitute for someone with keen eyesight, a passion for the work and lots of time to devote to dragging and dropping, pushing and pulling at the the widgets of a GUI until everything is just so.

    However, if you are satisfied with a workaday solution that gets the job done, then I think that the wxWidgets sizers do a reasonable job. Are you familiar with these? Specify how much space you want to leave around your widgets, and whether you want them arranged vertically or horizontally. Now all you have to do is add your widgets in order to the sizer, and the sizer will automatically arrange them in an often quite decent first pass sort of way.

    As a simple example, here is a simple form.

    The code:

    wxPanel * panel = new wxPanel(this,-1,wxPoint(-1,-1),wxSize(1000,1000));

wxSizerFlags szrflags(0);
szrflags.Border(wxALL,5);

wxBoxSizer * szrCRUDForm = new wxBoxSizer(wxVERTICAL );

wxFlexGridSizer * szr = new wxFlexGridSizer(2,1,1);

wxStaticText * field1text =  new wxStaticText(panel,-1,"Entry Field #1");
wxTextCtrl   * field1ctrl =  new wxTextCtrl(panel,-1,"              ");
wxStaticText * field2text =  new wxStaticText(panel,-1,"Second Entry Field");
wxTextCtrl   * field2ctrl =  new wxTextCtrl(panel,-1,"              ");
wxStaticText * field3text =  new wxStaticText(panel,-1,
    "A very big entry field\n"
    "with a lot of description\n"
    "Spread over several long lines of text");
wxTextCtrl   * field3ctrl =  new wxTextCtrl(panel,-1,"",wxPoint(-1,-1),wxSize(600,-1));
wxStaticText * field4text =  new wxStaticText(panel,-1,"Yet another Field");
wxTextCtrl   * field4ctrl =  new wxTextCtrl(panel,-1,"              ");

szr->Add( field1text,szrflags );
szr->Add( field1ctrl,szrflags );
szr->Add( field2text,szrflags );
szr->Add( field2ctrl,szrflags );
szr->Add( field3text,szrflags );
szr->Add( field3ctrl,szrflags );
szr->Add( field4text,szrflags );
szr->Add( field4ctrl,szrflags );

wxBoxSizer * szrButtons = new wxBoxSizer( wxHORIZONTAL );
szrButtons->Add( new wxButton(panel,-1,L"CREATE"),szrflags);
szrButtons->Add( new wxButton(panel,-1,L"READ"),szrflags);
szrButtons->Add( new wxButton(panel,-1,L"UPDATE"),szrflags);
szrButtons->Add( new wxButton(panel,-1,L"DELETE"),szrflags);

szrCRUDForm->Add( szr );
szrCRUDForm->Add( szrButtons );

SetSizer(szrCRUDForm);

    Produces the following GUI, without requiring any pushing or pulling

    enter image description here

    Here is an introductory, rather crude, tutorial http://neume.sourceforge.net/sizerdemo/

    Here is something more sophisticated http://zetcode.com/tutorials/wxwidgetstutorial/layoutmanagement/

    • 0