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One of the things that made NeXT work so well was their "developers" app (whose name I can't remember). It made creating custom apps extremely easy. I couple of clicks and you had a customized clock app, couple more clicks and it would read slashdot. It was the best tool to come out of NeXT. Other apps are catching up, like Glade but few can make custom apps that painless.

PS. My alma mater's CS department had NeXT cubes running as servers up until 1999 when upgrading them for Y2K was going to be $400 a pop. They wisely chose to switch to Linux.

For rapid development of GUIs I suggest Glade. It works with gtk and can output in C, C++ and other languages. I had an independent study on software engineering in college and we created an IMAP email client, Althea. None of us knew anything about making a GUI or gtk. We seemed to come out just fine in that category and we only had 10 weeks to finish!

As for an entire development suite, I agree with the other suggestions above.

I'm not an Ada developer, but I did notice that Glade supports Ada95. It's main function is for making graphical GTK programs, but it uses a meta-format, so the code it generates can be used for many different languages.

GUI IDE's are great, but we already have Glade. What we need is GUILE-GTK+ bindings and Glade-GUILE.

And yes, I started programming with BASIC, and I have used Visual Basic extensively, and boy, is it a pain. I wish my first language had been Pascal, or Java, or Python (although the latter two didn't exist).

is this incorporated with Glade. While one of the strengths of Linux, and open source in general, is the diversity of solutions available, I think it's important that there's a movement towards a well integreted set of tools.

Gingko

• WIMP - Windowed Interface with Mouse Pointer

  This "model" has become fairly much dominant, and continues to undergo various forms of "tweaking," lately with everyone going gonzo over Themes.

  Unfortunately, major changes require either nuking the whole thing and starting from scratch, which is a lot of work, or else making systems of more and more byzantine complexity to operate.

  The latter is where adding additional "stuff-to-click" takes us. Every added toolbar results in another "hieroglyphic" language, moving us towards ancient Egyptian rather than anything modern. (The McLuhan "Laws of Media" strike again...)

• MVC - Model/View/Controller

  The more "intelligent" sorts of changes don't necessarily involve increasing the visible complexity, but rather trying to split systems more clearly into this paradigm of designing, somewhat separately, an underlying model, a set of controller functions to control the object, and then some form of "front end," or "view."

  It's hardly new; Smalltalk and NeXTStep promoted the MVC "view of the world" umpteen years ago, and the problem really is that the ad-hoc GUI construction systems have so often conflated M, V, and C together that many GUI applications wind up as jumbled sets of functionality.

  It may be that introducing things like Glade User Interface Builder along with libglade , to encourage keeping "controller" stuff in once place, GNOME-print, Gnome Canvas, DPS for XFree86, and Display Ghostscript, ReportLab, providing "view" tools, and CORBA, providing separation of "model," may provide a direction to clearly separate these functions so that GUIs will be less confused.

None of this represents dramatic, overnight change, and I'm not sure that that's a bad thing.

This simply depends on how you define superiority. Perl is nice for some jobs, VB for some others.

Though I have to admit that I cannot imagine any job I would prefer VB to perl.

For GUI prototyping with perl I would give a shot with Glade - last time I checked it was far from perfect but it's developing pretty fast.
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There are several choices for solaris. dtbuilder, which is very simple and featureless but free and already in CDE/solaris. Sun's forte development environment, which can be try-n-buyed for 30 days or bought for anywhere between 300 (edu price) and 3500 USD. Both Kdevelop and GLADE work under solaris. Teleuse is actually not sold by telesoft, but by a company called aonix.

Just choose one of those options and you will be fine. If I had a choice myself I would use either Kdevelop or forte. Kdevelop because it uses qt so it is entirely c++ (which seems to be a requirement for you) as well as the possibility of portability since qt runs on windows. Forte, because Sun makes it so it will have Sun support as well as having a significant performance advantage on sparc.

If you decide on motif as your windowing toolkit and use forte and you have oodles of money in your pocket. Consider adding XRT. Very many high quality widgets which can improve the look of just about any gui.

I have both Ada and C experience. Ada thrashes C for non-trivial programs. Maybe the problem is that most open source software starts out as trivial programs that scratch a programmers itch.

C++ and Ada95 are roughly equivalent. To my mind C++ suffers from its class-centric view of everything. Look at the hassles C++ has with singletons while Ada neatly solves this with the package structure.

adapower is a good place to start for those interested.

Gtk+ is very nice to use and is totally free (GPL) across multiple platforms (Win32/BeOS/*Nix). In spite of the fact that it is written in Object Oriented C, it is quite easy and nice to use with C++. Also, Gtk-- is a C++ wrapper that is supposed to be very nice as well, and they have a Win32 port going on right now. When you add Glade (visual gui builder) into the mix, you get a very slick and powerful package. Definitely look into it.

As an aside, another C++ portable library that i hear is quite tasty is WxWindows.

That is entirely up to the developers. As someone on their way to releasing a GPL'ed music program for Linux, the last thing I want is to make the interface suck. There will be copious reminders to the effect that if you want something changed or have a feature/interface suggestion TO PLEASE MAIL THE AUTHOR. Just because the users in my case won't be programmers doesn't mean they can't contribute meaningfully to a project. I think many people are scared that if they can't program, they can't help an OSS project. This is not true: there's nothing more motivating to a developer than receiving lots of e-mails that say "great program but it would be nice if I could use the function keys to switch between windows."

For applications there are plenty of strategies to improve UIs:

• Make sure you've read and digested sites such as the Interface Hall of Shame. Yes it's funny, but there's a ton of wisdom in here that I certainly hadn't thought about regarding intuitiveness.
• If you're using Gnome, consider using libglade to make your UI a runtime loadable XML spec
• Allow users to customise anything they want - keys, layout, functions, look and feel
• Stick to the way your window manager/environment of choice does things
• Seperate your back-end completely from your front end. That way someone with more time and inclination can write a spiffy UI, leaving you to concentrate on the fun stuff.
• If possible, try and make sure command line options are there for advanced users. Don't assume everyone will want to point and click.

I'd also like to encourage the Gnome hackers to seriously consider working on an IDE similar to KDevlop. That is simply an amazing piece of work. You have all the documentation and tools necessary to rapidly create KDE applications...and it's very easy to use and intuitive. I know that Gnome has Glade and gIDE and there has been talk of integrating the two, but somehow that doesn't seem like the answer. I think Glade should be integrated into an IDE, but gIDE is no KDevelop, no offense to the author(s). A very functional IDE that even new hackers could use, would go a long way to getting further involvment int the gnome project.
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I'd also like to encourage the Gnome hackers to seriously consider working on an IDE similar to KDevlop. That is simply an amazing piece of work. You have all the documentation and tools necessary to rapidly create KDE applications...and it's very easy to use and intuitive. I know that Gnome has Glade and gIDE and there has been talk of integrating the two, but somehow that doesn't seem like the answer. I think Glade should be integrated into an IDE, but gIDE is no KDevelop, no offense to the author(s). A very functional IDE that even new hackers could use, would go a long way to getting further involvment int the gnome project.
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QT and GTK both lack good software for GUI building and prototyping. When you're trying out different looks for an application, it's REALLY annoying to have write code to have to specify the look'n'feel of an app when it makes much more sense to use your visual intuition to 'draw' the interface.

Qt and GTK+ may lack them, but the environments built atop them may have them; does Glade, for GNOME (and, it indicates, raw GTK+), or Kdevelop, for KDE, provide enough of that sort of functionality for you? (Kdevelop has a dialog editor, at least, and Glade also appears to have a way of visually constructing the GUI.)

I am told that KDE's KDevelop is very sophisticated and user friendly as well. There are commericial offerings, too...

And while I agree that these IDEs are essential in luring new productivity apps to the Linux platform, I don't really see them attracting new game titles. Almost all games (strategy, role-playing, FPS) these days seem to have a "home-grown" UI and don't rely on a standard widget set. Productivity app writers will benefit from these IDEs, but I don't think game programmers will (very much.)

Besides Open Source tools like Glade and JX Builder, Code Fusion (and other commercial tools like the Motif based BX pro) make for some very serious competition for Code Warrior. Maybe the abundance of such tools (and the availability of excellent Open Source ones) killed Codewarrior?
So instead of worrying too much about this (admittedly heavy) loss, look forward to new tools, and try one of the other ones!

I plan to make a simple interface with glade when the html render is 'released'. Just for personal browsing though, and something quick without lots of features (features == macho memory). I believe the gnome project is going to use the mozilla rendering engine for their html renderer too.

You should try Glade, at http://glade.pn.org
It is very mature, and has a different (and IMHO saner) philosophy then KDevelop, in that it generates an xml description of a UI. This description, when used with libglade, leads to very rapid development. For most simple apps, all of the GUI coding is effectively removed from the project -- all that's needed is writing the callbacks.

I've seen various people say things about the Gimp's interface, like: "I don't like it", or "I'm used to Photoshop, so learning a new interface is a pain". Anyway, this idea bubbled up in my brain as I was walking home yesterday:

One of the projects in the Gnome Software Map is libglade, a library which allows an app to load a user interface definition from Glade (the GTK user interface designer) at runtime, thus enabling user interfaces to be changed and used without a recompile.

My idea was, if the Gimp's interface was designed in Glade, and loaded via libglade, surely it would be possible for people to customise it to their heart's content, and enterprising souls could design and release custom interfaces, eg Photoshop clones, for those who need a tool that "just works" and don't have time to fiddle.

(when I was coding on the Amiga, I originally used an editor called CygnusEd. Then I replace it with one called GoldEd, which had an extremely customisable interface, so I could make all the menus, hotkeys, etc. the same as CygnusEd. This was fantastic, but obviously a lot of work for the programmer - surely something like libglade could allow our major applications such flexibility without demanding too much effort from the developers at all?)

What does anyone think?

Glade is a GUI development too for GTK. It can generate code for C, C++, Perl and Ada95. The code
generation is implemented seperate from the GUI builder so new language bindings can be added easily. I've used it for small projects and it absolutely rocks. Check it out at
glade.pn.org
The other thing I've looked at is Kdevelop. It's very impressive, if a bit KDE/Qt centric. It's generic enough that you could do editing/compiling/CVS from it, and it's got real nice HTML documentation generation tools. It's at
www.kedevelop.org. I think there's also a GUI designer for it. GIDE is for GTK/Gnome, it doesn't seem as mature as Kdevelop. It's at gide.pn.org.
Enjoy

Glade is a GUI development too for GTK. It can generate code for C, C++, Perl and Ada95. The code
generation is implemented seperate from the GUI builder so new language bindings can be added easily. I've used it for small projects and it absolutely rocks. Check it out at
glade.pn.org
The other thing I've looked at is Kdevelop. It's very impressive, if a bit KDE/Qt centric. It's generic enough that you could do editing/compiling/CVS from it, and it's got real nice HTML documentation generation tools. It's at
www.kedevelop.org. I think there's also a GUI designer for it. GIDE is for GTK/Gnome, it doesn't seem as mature as Kdevelop. It's at gide.pn.org.
Enjoy