Re: Nmap GUI

[Luke Triantafyllidis <triple () aeoth net>]

Fyodor wrote:

> o Machine code or interpreter?  People have applied to do the new
>  GUI in C/C++ with various libraries (Qt, GTK2, etc.), Java, Python,
>  and even .Net/Mono.  I tend to favor C/C++ because the distributed
>  application wouldn't require users to download a large interpreter.
>  But perhaps some interpreters (Python?) may be small enough to
>  distribute in the installer.
>  
I'd be leaning towards Python. There are many Windows applications (Bit 
Torrent) that get packaged along with a Python interpreter and the size 
is definitely not something I personally care about when downloading an 
application with a great track record. Tcl/Tk is another interpreter 
that has been packaged along with some applications (aMSN). The two DLLs 
(tcl84.dll and tk84.dll) along with the Wish application from 
ActiveState adds to 1.72MB. However, there are code libraries that will 
increase that size quite a bit more.

> o Eye candy -- One (potential) advantage of a GUI is that it can
>  support pretty pictures and icons.  I'm not talking about going
>  overboard with dancing pigs here, but unobtrusive icons can be
>  helpful.  For example, the host list could have icons next to the
>  host name with a linux penguin, BSD daemon, or other
>  platform-specific icon.  Perhaps even the services could be
>  deliniated in a similar way so that you easily recognize (say) ssh
>  daemons or mail servers in the results.
>  
Agree. One thing you find when doing usability and prototype testing is 
that users _always_ respond well to visual indicators. However, it is 
very easy to use icons that are obvious to one user, but not so obvious 
to another user. But, those are things that can be worried about later I 
suppose.

-Luke


_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev