GUI

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2002 at 08:51:25AM -0000, Richard Kavanagh wrote:
> [Survex] would be a lot easier to use if it had a Graphical User Interface.

We do have a GUI survey viewer (aven) which is the most interactive part of
Survex, i.e. where a GUI is most useful.  On Microsoft Windows, file
associations allow virtually everything else to be driven from Explorer.

> Is anybody working on this?

We're planning to slot printing and survey export (as DXF, Sketch, ASCII, etc)
into aven as modules for Survex 1.2.  These will also be still available as
separate utilities for those who prefer them that way (e.g. for use from
scripts).

The current survey network solving code is rather inherently a "one shot"
affair - my current thinking is to replace it with a different approach which
is more suited to the iterative sort of use which you'd want for fitting it
into a GUI.  But this is a fairly major undertaking and a longer term plan.

> My preferred tool is Borland C++ Builder.

We use wxWindows for the GUI, as it enables us to build for Microsoft Windows,
Unix, and hopefully soon on Mac OS, all with a native look and feel.

Currently we use GCC as our C and C++ compiler on all platforms where we
support the GUI.  The main reason for this is we can build it as a
cross-compiler and so compile all the versions on a Linux box with a single
script, which removes a lot of the tedious work from the release process.  But
if Borland C++ supports (most of) the ISO C++ standard it shouldn't be hard to
get it to work there too.

Cheers,
Olly