LC 8 Property Inspector

[Peter Haworth]

Completeness is indeed important, especially to newcomers as you point out.
There are some strange omissions from the pre-8 PI, e.g. it doesn't have a
place to specify a behavior for an option menu which, when I first started
using LC, led me to believe option menus couldn't have behaviors for some
reason.  I see that's been corrected in v8.

However, once you're past the newcomer stage, showing every possible
property is probably something you don't want, which brings me to the issue
of layout flexibility, the ability to organize properties together in a way
that makes sense for each individual user.  I want the properties I use the
most to show on a single tab, visible when I open the PI for an object,
with other properties grouped together in other tabs that fit the way I
work, even excluding some which I never use.

In some cases, properties seem like they are in the wrong place to me.  For
example,  the textHeight and firstIndent properties belong in the Text
formatting tab, not the basic tab, particularly textHeight which is
automatically changed when you change the font size.

I'm not sure the team should be devoting time to things like that right now
or maybe ever, so I included the ability to do all of the above in
lcStackBrowser

Pete
lcSQL Software <http://www.lcsql.com>
Home of lcStackBrowser <http://www.lcsql.com/lcstackbrowser.html> and
SQLiteAdmin <http://www.lcsql.com/sqliteadmin.html>

On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 11:59 AM, Richard Gaskin <ambassador at fourthworld.com>
wrote:

> Ali Lloyd wrote:
>
> > Labelled icons are also possible - we could potentially have a
> > preference setting for one, the other, or both.
>
> Inspectors are very useful in consumer apps, where the range of properties
> is often smaller and their scope less broad.
>
> In development tools we often see a Property Sheet that shows all
> properties, as opposed to the subset we've had available in all Inspectors
> thus far.
>
> Here's an implementation I've been using whenever I need things not found
> in any Inspector:
> <http://fourthworld.net/revnet/devolution/4W_Props.rev.gz>
>
> The design is largely functional, but suboptimal.  Time permitting it
> would group related properties together under collapsible headers.
>
> And when you think about, even if the Inspector were to continue to limit
> itself to a subset of object properties, once you start down the road of
> horizontal labels the design screams for such an accordion design anyway.
>
> Using that according design within a scrollable Property Sheet allows for
> most of what folks are looking for here:
>
> - Ease of access
> - Clear labels for related properties
>
> ...and adds something that I don't recall coming up here yet but would
> sooner or later:
>
> - Completeness, the ability to see all of an object's properties
>
> The latter is not only very valuable for pros who know about properties
> not commonly used enough to have merited inclusion in an Inspector, but
> also for newcomers who can learn about the scope of properties in an object
> in one place.
>
> --
>  Richard Gaskin
>  Fourth World Systems
>  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>  ____________________________________________________________________
>  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>
>
>
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