MC IDE: Passing the Poohbah torch and more (Richard Gaskin)

[Tariel Gogoberidze]

On  Wed, 21 Jun 2006 11:22:56 -0700 Richard Gaskin wrote:

> I've talked this over with Klaus Major via email, and he would be
> willing to assume the role of Poohbah for the MC IDE project going 
> forward.


Richard did exceptional job maintaining MC IDE. What I appreciated the 
most was that he was very careful to keep "purity" of MC IDE, his IDE 
changes were  "transparent"  in terms of no new IDE "behavior" or added 
complexity was introduced and most of  the changes were to just keep 
IDE compatible with new engines.

I'm sure Klaus will continue this tradition and 6 changes he made in 
IDE so far were all excellent.

Long live new Poohbah ! :)


> The Font Chooser stack contains a list field for font names rather than
> a popup button. I've been using this privately for a while and I like 
> it
> much better. Anyone who has as many fonts as I do will see the
> advantages of a list, I think.

SO much better. Thanks Jacque.

>
> I have also made some changes to the Preferences stack so that it now
> supports a stackFileVersion preference. I could not think of a suitable
> way to change this setting on the fly, but the new stack does allow you
> to permanently set the preference, which will stay in effect until you
> change it. It checks for the engine version and is not effective unless
> the version is 2.7 or higher.


Great.

  At Thu, 22 Jun 2006 J. Landman Gay wrote:

> I'm just looking at it now. It looks like the IDE version in the About
> box didn't get updated.

Right. Also it seems Richard's famous "StripAndShip" handler  was not 
applied to standalone builder SubStack and it still shows path to "area 
51"  :)

  "/Users/richardgaskin/Area51/...."

>
> The message box size is too small for me to read comfortably. I've
> already changed it in my own copy, but thought I'd mention it here to
> see if the majority wants it to ship the old way or the new way. I'm
> okay with just changing my own copy with each release if other people
> like it as-is.
>

Interesting. I can't see any change in msg box size between B12 and RC1 
but I didn't replace my Home stack if it makes any difference (don't 
remember right now from which stack the msg box default size comes 
from)

Speaking about sizes, I'm always changing the fonts and button sizes in 
  new MC IDE builds to accommodate to OS standards.

  For OS 9 the standard font  is Geneva 10 and button size is w= 95 and 
h= 22
  For OS X the standard font is Lucida Grande 11 and button size is w = 
82 and h= 23
  For Win the standard font is Tahoma 11, don't remember standard button 
sizes

So, may be it makes sense to put a small handler in PreOpenStack  of  
"mctools.mc" and "mchelp.mc" that would set the textfont and textsize 
of this stacks according to OS standards?

This way substacks   like "properties" or "control browser" would 
inherit TextFont and TextSise of the main stack and would look much 
better on all platforms.

Concerning default object sizes (when you create a new object) Rev has 
it done very nicely in "Preferences / Object sizes"
May be Klaus would consider to add such tab to MC IDE preferences stack 
and make it optional ?

That's one of few features I personally like in Rev ID and I'm 
imitating it by setting default sizes in  "on NewButton", "On NewField" 
etc in script of stack Home.

Also,   just to remind so this would not be lost in transition period 
:) ...  RC1 has libURL vs  1.1.4 and Dave Gragg posted vs 1.1.6 at

" http://www.lacscentre.co.uk/liburl/releases.html"


best regards
Tariel