nuther new newbie nuisance

Timothy Miller gandalf at DOCTORTIMOTHYMILLER.COM
Wed Jun 15 02:13:10 EDT 2011


Greetings,

I thought I knew how to do this, but it isn't working out.

I'm making a stack that will help me practice identifying birds. One card per species. Images and songs, mostly, plus a few fields for habitat, seasonality and so on. Some fields and buttons will be common to all cards, but most fields will not "share text." Each card will have different images.

Chances are I will gradually add fancy bells and whistles. I'll want to hide the name of the species, for instance, forcing myself to name the species by song or image, then show the name to see if I got it right. That sort of thing. I think I know how to do most of what I plan.

At the moment, I'm stuck on a basic problem, and I hope someone will help un-stick me.

I want to be able to make a new card, quickly and conveniently, type the name of the species into a field designated for that purpose, then paste several images onto the card -- as many as desired. The total area of the images will be quite a bit larger than the total area of the card, so I want the images to scroll vertically while retaining their positions, relative to each other. I don't mind dragging the new images to their desired locations manually.

There's something basic I'm not getting.

I thought if I pasted several images onto a card, scroll bars would magically appear, which would scroll the images as a group. Not happening. Maybe backgrounds scroll but stacks and cards don't?

I made a scrolling group, pasted multiple pictures in it. That works on one card. But if I set bgBehavior to "true," then "new card" duplicates all the pictures, and the pictures are shared between cards. I want different pictures on each card. If I set bgBehavior to "false," making a new card becomes complicated.

(I'm a hyperCard retread, so setting bgBehavior to "false" don't come natchrel.)

I don't need detailed instructions or scripts. Just a few hints.

Maybe I need to make a scrolling stack with scrollbar buttons, which I would script as needed, instead of depending on the native scroll bars you get with a scrolling group? Hmm... In that case, I guess I'd need to place the scroll bars on each new card...

Maybe I need to place a different group on each new card with bgBehavior set to false? Maybe a "new card" button with a script that places a new group on the new card, sets its rect and size and other characteristics?

Maybe there's more than one way to do what I want... probably so...


Thanks in advance.


Tim







More information about the use-livecode mailing list