Large Scripts Run too Slowly

Peter M. Brigham pmbrig at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 15:22:31 EDT 2015


On Apr 21, 2015, at 11:09 AM, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> Peter M. Brigham wrote:
> 
> > I've put gZipper into my plugins folder -- thanks, Richard! However,
> > I attempted to edit the stack -- just cosmetic stuff, the controls
> > weren't aligned and things were off-center, etc, I'm a little
> > obsessive that way, it really distracts me when stuff doesn't look
> > good. (I know this is just a quick and dirty utility, and Richard,
> > you are among the best at GUI, so no offense.)
> 
> No offense taken, but I appreciate your sensitivity.  While I try to balance layouts for products, the tools I make for myself are among the ugliest things ever conceived, with unlabelled buttons strewn about almost randomly and even sloppier code than what you'll find there.

Me too. But even then if I'm using it a lot myself I start spiffing it up over time, since otherwise the visual sloppiness starts distracting me. For instance, my utility library, pmbLib (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3504108/pmbLib.rev), which is really only for my own benefit, but I spent some time on its visual presentation in between more serious work, so it ends up being pleasant to look at. (When I get a moment, I mean to take a stab at cleaning up the GUI for Michael Doub's MasterLibrary, with his permission….)

> That's one of the nice things about open source: I can scratch and itch and move on, and anyone else who wants to refine it, extend it, or turn it into something entirely different is free to do so.  I put in just a little work to get it started, someone else comes along with greater care to flesh it out more, and over time it may become something kinda cool.
> 
> Happy to contribute to such a process, even if as modestly as that ancient stack.
> 
> > So, back to the point, I edited the positions of the controls, but
> > every time I tried to save the stack, LC crashed, leaving a
> > "corrupted" stack. When I restarted, the stack was still available
> > in the plugins list and opened fine, but if I tried to change the
> > opening mode, eg from modeless to palette, LC crashed again. The
> > trigger seems to be trying to save the stack.
> 
> Interesting.  I've seen a small handful of cases in which very old stacks (2.2 or earlier) have caused problems in later versions when the number of format changes between the two is large (three or more).
> 
> It's such a rare occurrence for me (not working on something for many years and then needing to update it again), and the problems I've seen so intermittent (these are very rare problems, and most old stuff works great in newer builds), that I've not been able to file a bug report.
> 
> Your note below is worth considering, but before I get to that it may be helpful to note that the reason the stack is modeless rather than palette is because I had often used it to drop files onto it from the Finder, and as a palette it would disappear when I switch to the Finder.

I use a paletted stack with systemwindow = true, and that makes it float above everything no matter what. I have a couple of utility standalones that work this way, for instance, one that allows me to drag and drop a file or folder from the Mac finder and get the filepath. (Another is a simple iTunes controller that lives in a corner of my screen, just a small round blue button about 24 pixels in diameter.) I've really never worked with modeless stacks.

> But that's a usability thing; as for the crashing:
> 
> > I'm guessing this is probably due to my running LC 5.5.1 still,
> > but advice would be appreciated.
> 
> IIRC correctly I'd spent very little time with v5.5.1.  Back when it came out I had a couple projects done in v4.6.4, and stayed with that build for an inordinately long time, almost until 6.1.  So I managed to skip almost the entire v5 series.
> 
> Given the ~2500 bugs fixed between 5.5.1 and the current version, 7.0.4, I have to wonder if perhaps a legacy import issue may have been among them.
> 
> It may be worthwhile grabbing a copy of the Community Edition of either 6.7.4 or 7.0.4 and see if you can reproduce that. If you can please file a bug report, but if not it may be that the issue was already identified and resolved.

I'll experiment this weekend.

-- Peter

Peter M. Brigham
pmbrig at gmail.com
http://home.comcast.net/~pmbrig






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