LiveCode for the rest of us

[J. Landman Gay]

At least some of the things you mention are already there, but are easy 
to miss.

On 9/21/2015 1:57 AM, Brahmanathaswami wrote:
> -- still futzing with getting the label of a button to center....

See the new "iconGravity" property.

> -- Oh... ouch, the color picker is giving me wrong RGB values when I use
> the dropper to pick color from somewhere else on the screen.
> Fortunately I have Eric Chatonet's color widget.. it still works and
> *his* picker gives me the *real* RGB values

I never noticed this. I wonder if it has something to do with the gamma 
and/or display settings on the machine. I believe LC returns the values 
that are reflected by the monitor rather than the actual numbers that 
were set in LC (or maybe it's the other way around.)

> -- Hmmm.. why align  objects isn't just be there in the menubar?

Objects -> Align Selected Controls

> -- OMG... typesetting support is all over the place, here, there, over
> there... this palette, that property.

I agree. And there are some very nice newer additions that haven't made 
it to the property inspector at all, and must be applied via the message 
box.

> -- Oh where can I set the design grid unit values? Oh, no grids?
 > -- where is my hide and show design grid? Oh right.. no grids...
 > -- Oh, where do I turn on "snap to grid" Oops right... no grid...

Yes, there's been a grid since MetaCard. It's set to either 1 or 2 px by 
default (can't remember, I changed it) so you probably didn't notice it 
was there. Toggle it on/off from the View menu. Set the size of the grid 
in Preferences -> Appearance -> Grid spacing. However, there are no 
visible lines for the grid, so maybe that's what you mean.

> -- Animation: I'm not looking to do Disney characters... or skins for
> Unity characters... I just want an object to move smoothly across the
> screen from point A to point B...So I have to code that? ok... but why
> is it so jerky... it's not smooth... like if I do css animation, it's
> smooth as skates on ice...flowing water... what's with LC?

You do have to code it, and that's what acceleratedRendering does along 
with the layerMode setting for each object. I'd like to see a blog post 
about this because it's not something that's readily apparent and does 
require some specialized tinkering. But once it works, animation is 
pretty good.

Good points about the other things in the list that I didn't include. 
Some of them, like changing text size with a keystroke, could be done 
without too much work and submitted as a contribution to the IDE. If I 
had more time I'd do it myself. If things calm down here, maybe I will. 
I hope that won't prevent someone else from trying though.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com