Magik Dialog Designer

Under the heading of “cool and useful Magik stuff”…

I recently had the opportunity to meet with a friend of mine who showed me his latest creation -- Dialog Designer

It is a tool that allows you to graphically layout your new Magik GUI with many of the commonly-used widgets, menubar, statusbar, and docks. Once you have layed out the GUI graphically and applied appropriate properties to the components, the Dialog Designer will stub out all the required Magik files, classes, methods, shared constants and XML config/gui files and place them in a new module directory structure.

While it will not write the Magik behaviour behind the widgets – you still need to write Magik code that does something when the button is clicked – it goes a very long way to building your :build_gui() method for you. And the nice thing is that tricky tasks like resizing rowcols or other widgets is now done automatically for you.

As a long-time Magik developer, I have never been too excited about GUI design because it can be a bit complicated (and time consuming) in Magik. Using the Dialog Designer will make the GUI design considerably easier and definitely save you a number of hours per GUI in development time.

The company that my friend works for has said that they will release the Dialog Designer to the SourceForge MagikComponents community. Until they have done that, I will keep the name of the developer and his company to myself. Stay tuned for a press release from them (hopefully soon) announcing the availability of this very cool and useful tool for Magik developers.