On 8/20/18 8:32 PM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
Swami has not asked me to evaluate strategies for precise control of his layouts. That would not be possible until I see how things are constructed.
He estimated months, and that sounds about right. Every card is laid out differently. The project is gigantic.
Just yesterday I delivered a UI with several hundred controls on a card, some quite deeply nested within groups. But the layout did not require writing anywhere close to one line per object. Some was handled in loops, others handled by simply grouping objects and placing the group. Some don't need to be moved at all because their natural placement relative to topleft need not change. Others were handled by combinations of the above in reusable behaviors.
It's not always like that. Like the sample stack we were working on here, just moving a group doesn't always work. The group needs to be resized, as do all its components. Field properties often need to be managed manually, text sizes and heights adjusted. Loops are fine if you're dealing with grid-type things, but useless when no two objects are the same. FSM manages all that without any scripts at all.
Auto-resizing does require an awareness during initial layout of how fullscreenMode works. The objections you've raised can all be dealt with if you're a stickler for HIG (which even the companies who publish them don't follow. They're just guidelines.)
I'm not saying FSM is the be-all and end-all, and as we've seen here there may be cases where manual adjustment is necessary, but for what I mostly do it's a lifesaver.
We're scripters; we generally enjoy scripting. But reasons I don't yet understand, writing the relatively small part of the code to deliver a precise UI annoys people to the point of spending a multiple of the time the task requires trying to find ways of avoiding the task.
In my experience this is exactly backwards, maybe because we develop different types of apps. The core code goes pretty quickly, and manual scaling takes more time than anything else. Even if the lines of script aren't overwhelmingly numerous (though sometimes they are) the calculations are a time sink. It usually takes more than just aligning the rects of controls on a card. Maybe that's not true for things like utility apps or straightforward layouts, but for multimedia and games you can't just put the top of one thing at the bottom of another; it's all percentages and ratios and placement of objects in a calculated area of the screen. Compare that against doing nothing at all except for a single line of code and there's no contest.
I suppose people are pretty tired of this conversation now, but the reason I keep answering is because I really believe that FSM is one of the greatest boons the team has given us, and it's saved me hours and hours of effort. I'd be sorry if users think they have to spend all that time scripting individual objects and writing repeat loops. It doesn't have to be that hard (and it is hard. It's tedious and tiresome and fiddly and not at all fun.)
There is a quick and gentle way to get your apps on any device with much less effort. If people don't like the default results, it is still possible to adjust the fiddly stuff as needed while allowing the engine to do most of the work.
Tell you what. Let's have one of our friendly chats some time and I'll will either convince you or hit you over the head with my goody bag at the next conference. :P
-- Jacqueline Landman Gay | jac...@hyperactivesw.com HyperActive Software | http://www.hyperactivesw.com _______________________________________________ use-livecode mailing list use-livecode@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode
