Zoom !

[Pete_engineer]

I think that Basic4PPC v5.5 is quite frankly pretty marvellous.
The one thing that might make it even easier to use might be a 'zoom' option in the desktop version of the Form Designer, so that you could zoom into the form when positioning your buttons etc. (A simple 2:1 would be more than enough).

It can be pretty fiddly at the moment and when working on PC monitors that are running at high resolution the little 320 x 240 form seems tiny in the middle of the screen, especially when I'm cramming an un-feasibly large number of controls onto one form....

- but even if that's not feasible, you've still taken under a year to turn Basic4PPC into one of the most cost-effective, easy to use and powerful development environments available for mobile devices.

- Not just Respect, Massive Respect!.

-Pete the Engineer

[taximania]

Welcome to the forum Pete

[Pete_engineer]

Nice to be back,
I had posts on the old one before it vaporised into the cyber-ether.
Its nice to have such an open friendly and well mannered forum.

-P

[RandomCoder]

Pete,

When positioning controls I often place them roughly where I need them, then tweak the Top, Left, Width and Hieght values to position the control exactly where it needs to be.

Regards,
RandomCoder

[Cableguy]

The one thing that might make it even easier to use might be a 'zoom' option in the desktop version of the Form Designer, so that you could zoom into the form when positioning your buttons etc. (A simple 2:1 would be more than enough).

It can be pretty fiddly at the moment and when working on PC monitors that are running at high resolution the little 320 x 240 form seems tiny in the middle of the screen, especially when I'm cramming an un-feasibly large number of controls onto one form....

I agree with you Pete (welcome back), and althoug RandomCoder ( were have you been, my friend, hows the Icon editor comming along?) like's to "tweak" the contrls position in code, it's maybe because he does almost all of his code in the device...

For us who find much more confortable to use b4ppc in a desktop or Mobile pc,, it a lot harder to visually place controls, especially adjacent ones...
For instance, in my pairs game I had to create all the controls in runtime because I found it was impossible to place them by hand, exactly were I wnated them to be.
Now I coding yeat another graphical puzzle game and need to overlap the last collumn/row of a controls (image) graphical display in order to make it look as I NEED them to...So YES, a 2X ZOOM would be MUCH apreciated...

[RandomCoder]

Originally Posted by Cableguy

... althoug RandomCoder ( were have you been, my friend, hows the Icon editor comming along?) like's to "tweak" the contrls position in code, it's maybe because he does almost all of his code in the device...

I wasn't meaning to alter the controls position in run-time, they can be 'tweaked' in the GUI.

For the last few weeks I've been busy trying to catch up with work that I missed whilst on holiday with the family.
The Icon editor is, I fear, too difficult a challenge for me. I'm making slow progress and really must try to devote more time to developing it.
Hopefully by the end of the month I'll at least have something to show. Got to admit though, I'd have been more enthusiastic about it if it had been more popular.

Maybe the next competition will prove to be more popular.

Regards,
RandomCoder

[Cableguy]

OFF-TOPIC - The icon editor was from the start a too ambicious project for us to start from....Once I got to the tools part of it I saw no way, thou there must be one, to andle them...So I gave up...I like the competion idea, we only started to high of a chalange...

Back to topic....
Tweaking the control's position in the GUI is sometimes a very time consuming and frustating effort...
Image 25 image boxes, 40by40, and every box must be set top-1 and left-1 of the precedendent image control's top+height and left+width....incode it is somewhat easy after we can "formulize" the position, visualy its very hard...
With a 2x zoom it would be easyer to do...

[RandomCoder]

Originally Posted by Cableguy

Image 25 image boxes, 40by40, and every box must be set top-1 and left-1 of the precedendent image control's top+height and left+width....incode it is somewhat easy after we can "formulize" the position, visualy its very hard...
With a 2x zoom it would be easyer to do...

I say.... do it in run-time
It's much quicker and you would get a far greater sense of acheivement than spending all that time fiddling about with the controls in the designer just so that it can do the code for you.
Please don't mis-understand me, I like the designer and think that it's great , but for multiple controls set to a grid type of arrangement its just far easier to do it in run-time, at least for me it is

Regards,
RandomCoder.