Re: GUI Builder or lack of!

[davidf(at)dfanning.com (David Fanning)]

Craig Markwardt (craigmnet@cow.physics.wisc.edu ) writes: 

> Sometimes you make it sound like we're *not* paying multi-hundreds to
> multi-thousands of dollars for IDL.  Yearly even.

Now I didn't make any comment at all about whether our
maintenance dollars are well spent. (But let's just say
I'm *very* interested in that new HotDispatch service
where you post your question and how much you would
be willing to pay for the answer. I like the idea of
letting the market decide how much something is worth. :-)

I'm just saying that some things sound better in theory
than they actually turn out to be in practice. I'm 100%
behind RSI on this one. Converting the GUI Builder to run on 
all platforms would be a terrible waste of resources. 
 
> While I'm in the camp that roles their own user interface by hand
> (when needed), I can totally understand and sympathize with the
> frustration over OS favoritism that was described.

Absolutely. But I'm realistic enough to know that some
operating systems are more equal than others just by 
virtue of the number of licenses running on them.

Cheers,

David

P.S. Interestingly, a friend of mine and I had a real
application builder (as opposed to a GUI-builder)
working on multiple platforms about a year ago. But
we got to the stage where we had to decide if there
was a market for it or not. After shopping it around
to quite a few people, none of whom were reaching
for their wallets, as I recall, we decided that there
was a very good chance we would sink a lot of time and
money into a product no one really wanted to buy.
I'm sure RSI has probably conducted their own
feasibility study with similar results.

-- 
David Fanning, Ph.D.
Fanning Software Consulting
Phone: 970-221-0438 E-Mail: davidf@dfanning.com
Coyote's Guide to IDL Programming: http://www.dfanning.com/
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