File/Picture Chooser Widgets for Windows XP/2000 - Stable or still Beta?

[Bob Warren]

Dear Windows XP/2000 Users,

It seems that "Ken's bug" in the chooser widgets has now been solved, so 
with the inclusion of one or two small cosmetic details in #1, I will 
soon be passing the file and picture chooser widgets from "beta" to 
"stable" status. It will take a few days though, since I have been 
neglecting my "other" work recently and I need to catch up! Unless 
anyone else has difficulties to report, #1 will probably be released 
next week. I'll let you know.

This is the first real piece of RR software I have produced, and I think 
it serves as an excellent example of how helpful the RR community can 
be, and how this U-R List, though not perfect, is certainly "good enough"!

Bob Warren

Ken Ray wrote:

>On 1/26/06 9:04 PM, "Bob Warren" <robertum at brturbo.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>When you are ready and settled down again, Test Pack #4 is available for
>>download at http://www.howsoft.com/runrev/stacks.htm .
>>    
>>
>
>Finally got a few moments to check this out, and it looks good! all the
>options seem to set properly and work as expected. Congratulations! AFAICT
>you're good to go...
>
>I have a few cosmetic comments though:
>
>1) The filters at the bottom of the dialog, although they work just fine,
>look like they need something between the "*.doc" and the "Word documents";
>it kind of runs together. I know in "standard" dialogs, they are shown as:
>
>  All Files (*.*)
>  Text Documents (*.txt)
>
>etc. Your call, of course...
>
>2) The buttons will look better with smaller textHeight (leading) depending
>on wehther bold/italic is selected as well as the text size. I'm not sure
>you can do much about it, but Arial 12 looks fine, but if you switch to MS
>Sans Serif 12 or 11, it renders as 10 point (it's a system thing), but the
>text height is off. Perhaps it's just caveat emptor. :-)
>
>Anyway, good going, Bob!
>
>Ken
>
>  
>
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That is indeed good news. Thanks very much, Ken!

You're right about the filters. In fact, for #2 of the widgets to be 
produced later, I already plan to include the possibility of multiple 
filters of the type *.jpg;*jpeg. But having the description on the left 
rather than on the right was something that got inverted in my mind, 
even looking at examples from other apps! However, although it is 
non-standard in the widgets, there are no practical difficulties 
involved, so it remains for me to decide whether to make this adjustment 
already in #1 or to leave it until #2. My aim for #1 was to produce a 
pair of "simple, stable, acceptable" widgets only, so I might save it up 
as another "goody" to make #2 more attractive. Anyway, I am anxious to 
create the time to get on with #1 for Linux (and perhaps MAC).

At the moment, the text size of the buttons is set to exactly the same 
size as the text for the HD panes, but the sizes of the buttons are 
fixed, so if the font is too big the words don't fit into the button 
space correctly. In #2 I can simply allow the user to adjust the button 
text size independently by including another parameter in the INI files. 
At the moment (in #1), the user simply has to choose a font size which 
gives a satisfactory cosmetic appearance overall. (Of course, I could 
fix the button font and size myself, but since the user is able to 
change the fontname and size of the HD panes, there would be a potential 
conflict between the font name used for the panes and the font name used 
for the buttons. Nor could I simply fix the size of the button font, 
since a given size in any given font means different things, and in fact 
some fonts have a terrible appearance at certain sizes.)

Once again, I am sure you won't mind if I post this reply to the U-R 
List, as the contents are of potential interest to other users.

Many thanks once again!

Best regards,
Bob

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Ken Ray wrote:

Oh, one other cosmetic thing - if you resize the pickers vertically from the
bottom to make them shorter, when you reach the point where they can't
resize anymore and continue to move the mouse upward, the dialog box
"shakes" as it redraws. It seems like you're managing the minimum size
manually - you don't need to do that, as there are minWidth and minHeight
stack properties which will by their nature just prevent the window from
being sized down smaller than the 'mins'. Oh, and there is maxWidth and
maxHeight too, but you probably don't need those.

Just FYI,

Ken

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That's a good tip! I half knew that, but it didn't dawn on me to employ 
it here. I'll put it into the last  #1 project.

Bob