Fields Have Labels

[Richard Gaskin]

I'm indulging in a hat switch here with my CM sig because I think this 
aspect of the discussion may be helpful for many community interests:

Peter Haworth wrote:

 > Wouldn't expect it to be implemented any time soon for the reason
 > you pointed out.  I just want to get it on record so it's not
 > forgotten as a possibility for the future.

Ideally (fully recognizing that we don't live in an ideal world <g>), 
the items in the RQCC would be actionable.  With feature requests, this 
might mean that we've taken the time for community discussion to decide 
what it is we're asking them to implement.

Once in a while there may be aspects of some feature requests which 
require input from the team, and thankfully Mark Waddingham and the 
others there tend to have good judgement about such things and the 
conversations in the RQCC are generally very productive, even if the 
original submission was lacking in detail.

In this case, though, given the range of opinions expressed here it may 
be helpful to continue this thread a bit longer, to flesh out some of 
the details so that later one someone on the team or a member of the 
community can treat the request as a spec and just dive in to make it 
happen.


 > I often see great ideas discussed on this list but, as with bugs,
 > if they don't make it to the QCC, there's no chance they will
 > ever be implemented.

If an idea is so easily forgotten, what is its enduring value?

I'm not referring to this field label proposal here, but merely 
expressing a certain happy acceptance of the reality that we can 
brainstorm all sorts of things, but over time only a subset of them come 
up often enough to warrant investing in them.  I can't begin to describe 
how many half-baked ideas I have floating around in my hard drives. :)

In brief, I don't mind when ideas get forgotten, as I can have 
confidence that if something is frequently needed it'll come up again.


 > I already have it as a custom control and it sounds like others do
 > too but it would be much more elegant if it was implemented within
 > the engine.

Given the extreme likelihood that any implementation by RunRev would be 
done in the same LiveCode we all use, I wouldn't sell your or any other 
implementation short.

On the contrary, I believe it may be helpful to identify the specific 
ways in which a custom control may be inelegant, and make sure we have 
what we need to make it as elegant as if it were a native control.

Because that's really what the future of controls in LiveCode is all about.

Let's have the future today.  Or at least as soon as practical.

Let's figure out what we need for a wonderfully graceful implementation, 
and see that it happens.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  LiveCode Community Manager
  richard at livecode.org