macOS Question about developing interface.

[jaragones]

Hello,

I was thinking about to develop a program for Mac such DIA or Microsoft Project. My question is... I'm not sure which kind of developing program I should use for the interface. OpenGL/CL, Quartz or just a game engine. How can I develop a drag & drop interface such those programs?

Thank you in advance for your time.
Jordi Aragones
http://www.slidink.com

 

[lee1210]

I would start like any other desktop application and start building your application using Interface Builder and Cocoa in XCode. If you find that the standard views are not doing it for you once you get to drawing (did you mean Visio instead of MS Project? b/c Project is a pretty straight-forward desktop app, not very graphically intensive) you can slap an OpenGL view in there and go to town.

I wouldn't "start hard" with a full OpenGL app for a desktop application. You might be surprised and find that the standard views do everything you need.

-Lee

 

[SidBala]

If you want to develop UI, then, hands down: Microsoft Expression Blend 4. It is like photoshop, but for UI.

OTOH, I you were looking for coding a UI that you already have developed, then you can use pretty much anything. There is a trade off between ease of use and flexibility.

Cocoa/QT/WPF etc are UI toolkits, and will offer standard views and controls that are very easy to use. But what you can do might be limited.

OpenGL is an extremely generic graphics framework. You will have to implement everything if you want to make an UI on this. Each button, each control- every line, you need to draw yourself. And then there is mouse handling - which you need to do. But you can do anything you want in OpenGL

So it is just a matter of flexibility vs ease of use.

 

[jaragones]

Hi!

Lee.
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Yeap I meant Visio (not project). I'm not used to Cocoa, but I'm not sure if there is a component that allows me to develop an application that is based in a drag and drop functionality (talking that I'm dragging and dropping images and not text) as I would use in a "text" application.

Sidbala.
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I didn't know anything about Microsoft Expression Blend, I will have a closest look, but... having a quick look to the System Requirements, I believe that the application only will be able to be used in Windows computers.

As I said before, the Cocoa components I don't know if they have the capabilities to drag and drop images to a workspace and link them.

An another point is... an application with OpenGL I'm sure that it's hardest to implement but, at the end, maybe will be more portable to other platforms, isn't? Such Linux, Windows?

Thanks for yours answers.
Jordi Aragones
http://www.slidink.com