Bearfruit

I’ve been primarily a Swing programmer for 6 years now. I’ve also done a couple of C# winforms apps. I’ve got to say that my productivity in building forms in Matisse is far less than when building forms in Visual Studio. Matisse is great on simple forms and dialogs. But on more complex forms, it becomes unbelievably frustrating and time-consuming. It tries to be too intelligent about what it thinks you want to do and often just moves things around wildly when trying to do simple adjustments or additions of components.

If Matisse just stuck to a simple anchoring and alignment approach where you can anchor any and all edges of a component to other components or to the enclosing container edges, life would be easy. Currently it seems to prevent anchoring more than 2 edges of a component and relies on grouping to do the resizing. There’s too much mystery meat in its approach. Visual Studio has a simple anchoring, aligning and docking approach that just works.

I know that I’m in the minority here because I only see people raving about Matisse. I wonder if these people have built complex forms using both Visual Studio and Matisse. I’d love for someone to point out something that I’m doing wrong so that I could love Matisse.