Developping Gnome apps : need general advise...

[Vincent Trouilliez]

With so many talented developers on here, I am sure this is the best
place to ask :-)

I am normally more into playing with little embedded devices, 8
micro-controllers that kind of things, and used to hate programming on
PC's, just not fun nor rewarding enough. The only decent piece of
program I wrote on a PC, took me one month, and my boss asked me to do
it on MS Visual Basic Pro. One month of nightmares trying to get MS
Visual Basic to do what I wanted, and not what it thought was what I
wanted. I thought of committing suicide 2 or 3 times because of it, that
bad ;o) But after a month, it eventually worked and I promised myself to
never even remotely think of programming a PC again...

...but that was 5 years ago. I have not programmed anything since, not
even embedded devices. However, I have now discovered Linux and
Ubuntu/Gnome, which put fun back into computing, and I am now digging
out an old project, and need advise on what tools are best to use to
program it.

The project is to connect to a car's engine managment system through the
serial/RS-232 port, read it constantly to display loads of engine
parameters on the screen, and log the data into a text/CSV file onto the
computers hard disk at the same time. This is the sort of thing that
gave me nightmare with MS Visual Basic at the time, albeit was data
logger not a car, but similar kind of job.

I have found out how easy it is to write a piece of code in a text
editor and compile it in a heart-beat wih gcc at the command line,
lovely. For a text UI, I found out about the 'ncurses' library.

Now I need advice about the best IDE to develop Gnome/GUI apps.
Something like MS Visual Basic, that let's you design the GUI and main
code that interacts with it, easily. 
I just discovered "Glade", looks great, but I am a bit reluctant :

1) how easy is it to "bond" the GUI with the core program
2) I see only Gnome widgets in the "Palette", but I would need a few
extra readouts, like LEDs and round/analog gauges (to make a virtual
cockpit and display the basic engine parameters, rpm, oil pressure/temp
etc). Can Glade use custom/third-party widgets like this ? (and where to
find them, or make my own...)

I would rather prefer to use C language as that's what I feel most
confident with (MS basic was a true nighmtare :-/ ). I might make an
effort and stretch to C++ is that can help.
Are there  mature/solid IDEs (Gnome native if possible...) that let you
design both the GUI and the main C code, and let you add custom
objects/elements/readouts to the GUI ?

So basically what I will need is read lots of data constantly from the
serial port, do some byte crunching and display all the info nicely,
whilst writing everything to disk at the same time. So I need easy to
use high-level routines to read/write text files and read/write the
serial port... doable ?

Thanks for any help/info/comments/suggestions/whatever you see fit :-)

--
Vince