Blog

In my opinion, the #1 most important aspect of any software is it's interface (aside from doing something useful, of course). How easy is it to use? How intuitive and streamlined is it? Case in point, their are many video editors for Linux... so why is nobody happy? Many of them can combine video clips and add an audio track or two. The answer? They are all hard to use, offer a terrible user experience, require crazy command line hacks, or the user interface severely limits the feature set (i.e. not a non-linear editor).

Now that I am becoming more familiar with Python as a language, I realized that their are many choices (i.e. frameworks) that are available for user interfaces. I don't understand why their are so many, but that doesn't change the fact that their are many. So the question of the day is... which interface choice is the best one for a video editor?

Believe it or not, their are 40+ different graphical user interfaces (i.e. GUI) available for Python. Here is a complete list of them.

After many hours of research, downloads, and examples, I have selected my favorite (and hopefully the best GUI designer / framework): Glade (using PyGTK). The Glade designer seems to be the most feature packed, and is considered by many as the #1 GUI designer for GTK. Best of all, I don't have to create the interface with endless lines of code, rather I can load the interface with a single line of code: MyInterface = gtk.glade.XML("MyGUI.glade"). The interface is stored as an XML file, and loaded at runtime. Very nice.

(Screenshot of the Glade Interface Designer)