I'm probably going to get slammed for bringing this up, but why did
ITTVIS remove the GUI builder? Yes, I have bought David's totally
awesome book and can hand-code widget interfaces. However, for small,
quick and dirty programs with fancy interfaces... the GUI builder can
hardly be beat for speed and ease.
As the only person who knows IDL in a resource limited lab of ~20
people, and with a flood of features being needed, lightweight
programs running on the virtual machine are a must. I don't have time
to add some widgets to my program and then empirically determine how
best they are displayed on UNIX, Mac, and PCs! Many of the GUI
builder's original annoyances are gone in the version I currently use
(6.3), and after understanding its quirks, it's fairly easy to use.
I'm sure it must be hard to incor****ate the GUI builder into the
Workbench, but I wonder how much they tried. I lately get the feeling
that the novice or non-power user of IDL is getting left more and more
in the dust, as IDL seems to be transitioning from an easy to learn
programming environment for some light-to-somewhat-heavy data
analysis, to a very complex programming language with much overhead in
which to be trained, IMHO. In summary, I don't think I'll be upgrading
anytime soon.
Take care,
frank
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