[Haskell-cafe] My experience setting up Haskell up for GUI development

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 00:13 +0400, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> Hello Ben,
> 
> Sunday, May 18, 2008, 10:26:09 PM, you wrote:
> 
> > So, in practice, do other people write GUI apps with Haskell on
> > Windows? And if they do, how do they do it? I feel I've got to the
> > stage where I need a concrete recommendation from the experts.
> 
> after i've wrote a few thousands lines with gtk2hs, i think the
> following:
> 
> if main part of your program is GUI - it's better to stick with C# and
> all its visual bells and whistles. the only good thing with gtk2hs is
> that you got Linux portability for free. actually, people will think
> that you have developed it on linux and ported to windows at the last
> day :D  look at http://freearc.org screenshots or install program
> itself to see that i mean

Yeah, there are a couple visual improvements you could make. For one
thing you could use your own icon rather than the default Gtk+ window
icon.

Do you use glade to design the UI layout or do you do it by hand in
code? It's usually pretty easy to spot UIs that are built by hand or
using layout combinators. A good guide here is the GNOME HIG (Human
Interface Guidelines).

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/

Duncan