“Kylix is a screen space pig, as are all the other integrated
development environments I’ve ever seen. It starts up with a main
menu/tool bar that contains all the usual features: file and
project operations, clipboard control, tool and environment
settings, compile and debug functions, and so forth. There is also
an object properties dialog, a graphical form editor (for GUI
layouts) and a source code browser that is linked to the object
class tree. There is a lot of information presented, and it is very
well organized, so I’m not really criticizing Borland for taking up
a lot of real estate on the monitor — but you should be aware that
this is not a tool you’ll want to use on a display smaller than
1024×768.”
“The menus and toolbars are extremely customizable, and many of
the window sub- panes can be docked together or floated
independently. I intentionally avoided changing many of the default
settings so that the screenshots with this review would be more
typical, but rest assured there are a lot of virtual knobs to
twiddle and levers to pull in the Kylix user interface. The
widgets, both in Kylix itself and in the runtime application
environment, are mature and solid, working as expected without the
anomolies and annoyances that I have sometimes seen under older X11
environments. Kylix is a very polished tool, and except for the
errrors mentioned previously the GUI development environment worked
quite well for me.”
“Kylix is geared toward a ‘project’ mentality, as are most IDEs,
but the project management dialogs stay mostly out of the way
during the coding process. I was pleased to see that my coding
efforts were integrated smoothly into Kylix’s own project
repositories; for example, one UI form that I created became
available for re-use without any action on my part. To make objects
globally reusable requires a few clicks on a menu, but is not at
all difficult. The only negative comment I have for the project
management functions was that it was unclear, at least to me, how
the visible IDE popups related to the underlying source code and
resource files. When I clicked on ‘File…Save’ from the IDE menu,
I was not always sure which file I was saving, and where. There is
a ‘File…SaveAll’ function which is sometimes enabled and
sometimes not, and again I could not fathom what determined this
option’s status. Likewise, the ‘File…Reopen’ list includes both
individual files and entire projects, and it was not clear to me
the implication of re-opening a previous code file from within a
different project. Probably this is all documented somewhere, but
it was not intuitively obvious.”