Scrolling speed of a data grid

[Terence Heaford]

New thread created following Richards comment in Support for Mac OSX 10.5

> The main reason I have not become a fully paid up member is for me
> the lack of a speedy scrolling  data grid.

> Do you have any details on that you can share?  Between Trevor's excellent scripting, recent additions to the engine, and future engine enhancements, I'd like to think we can find a way to get satisfying performance for you on that.

I work in three Desktop development environments, not really interested in Mobile.

1. SuperCard.
2. Objective-C/Cocoa/Xcode.
3. LiveCode Community Edition.

I have used SC for years and I am very familiar with Scripting.

I have programmed in Objective-C really only to produce Externals for SC.

I started a challenge to myself to produce a home financial app in SC, Objective-C and LiveCode.

In SC I found the use of fields to create a table (20 rows * 6 columns) was not fast enough when scrolling
As a result I created an external to access the fields and place data, this increased the speed to nearly as fast as Objective-C.

In Objective-C it’s as smooth as silk. Nothing else to say.

I then saw LiveCode and placed a small contribution to the update/stretch goals as I was/am concerned that SC is not going to be updated.

I decided to give the financial app a go in LC when I saw the data grid as access to placing/retrieving data is straight forward.
However, I have been disappointed by the speed of scrolling.

I have a Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz late 2008 unibody that could do with an update but is capable of handling this stuff.

So, as a guide:

1700 records consisting of text for date,type,description,amount,balance,category.

Using the page up/down scroll:

1. Cocoa - 4.5 seconds
2. SC with external - 5 seconds
3. LiveCode DataGrid - 9 seconds

I have over the last 2 days assembled my own table using fields/scroller as a group simply for displaying the data, selection of rows and monitoring for mouse double click.

It is unfinished but it’s performance is currently at 6.5 seconds, not to shabby.
It obviously does not have the bells and whistles of the Data Grid, which if it had would probably slow down it’s performance.

One of the main selling points of LiveCode and SuperCard is supposed to be the ease of programming which really appeals to me as opposed to Cocoa/Objective-C
which I can get my head around but takes so long to achieve a result.

But.. with LiveCode and SuperCard you should NOT have to assemble your own complicated Groups to script a standard user interface object.
This is what frustrates me the most. If the people at LiveCode would implement a speedy DataGrid then all would be well.

I sometimes think these things are not done because they are deemed to complicated and time consuming.
I believe it’s the same at SC.

If you can come up with any ideas, I would be grateful.

I thought about having a go at a LC external but to be honest I have had enough of trying to correct the limitations of these development environments.

This is why I am now looking at Xojo to see how their product performs.

I have used RealBasic in the past and from a time vs output point of view found that it lies somewhere between LiveCode and Cocoa.

I have become really used to the LC/SC scripting language and really don’t want to leave.

All the best

Terry