Best practice for creating a resizable HUD-style widget stack background?

[Keith Clarke]

Hi Scott,
Thanks for the response, comprehensive clarification and the link to the newsletter and hence, your demo stacks - all really useful stuff. 

I see now that managing these custom stack window shapes is (without wishing to sound critical of LiveCode) very similar to managing rounded rectangles in web pages for IE compatibility - i.e. the nine-image trick. 

As I don't need drag-to-resize, I reckon I can create a script-driven, rounded rectangle window shape that grows to fit its contents. If I keep the background colouring simple I reckon I can adapt a trick I've used on web pages into a script:
1. Import the 4 corner images but use LiveCode rectangles for the 5 rectangles that form the central cross;
2. Setting the HUD contents to a group and use the group's dimensions (plus margins) to set the size of the cross' component rectangles;

Thanks again - oh, and item 8 in the newsletter http://runrev.com/newsletter/may/issue70/newsletter3.php has inspired me to have a go with adding a resizing preferences drawer, too!
Best,
Keith.. 
 
On 15 Mar 2011, at 21:51, Scott Rossi wrote:

> 
> For a resizable custom window, you must create a mask image for every
> size/orientation of window that you'll need.  But a window that a user can
> drag-to-resize is out of the question because you'd have to generate a mask
> image each step of the way during the drag and redraw the window repeatedly.