LC8DP15 feedback-IDE Issues

[J. Landman Gay]

On 3/1/2016 8:32 PM, Mark Wieder wrote:
> On 03/01/2016 04:08 PM, J. Landman Gay wrote:
>> On 3/1/2016 5:23 PM, Peter Haworth wrote:
>>> Don't use the Project Browser so can't comment on the second issue
>>
>> It's confusing, Ali had to explain it to me. I still mostly use the App
>> Browser because I need the column layout.
>>
>> In the Project Browser, the dotted selections are the objects selected
>> on the card. You can't alter dotted-line selections from within the PB,
>> you need to open the property inspector for that.
>>
>> The hilited lines are selections you've made directly in the PB. The
>> icons at the bottom act on those only. So you can click the icons at the
>> bottom to manage the PB-selections (the hilited lines) to resize or
>> align. The card-selected objects (dotted lines) won't change. If you
>> want the card selections to be acted on, you need to manually re-select
>> them in the PB so their lines are hilited as well as dotted.
>>
>> The idea was to be able to select things in the PB that may not be in
>> view, even on totally different cards or stacks, and be able to work
>> with them without going there. Hilited lines indicate which objects will
>> be affected. This could be useful. On the other hand, there is now a
>> disconnect between visible selections on a card and objects you can act
>> on within the PB.
>>
>> Selections also act slightly differently in the Property Inspector. It
>> used to be you could shift-click several objects and then double-click
>> any one of them to open the multi-object inspector. That doesn't work
>> now. Instead you double-click one object on the card to open its
>> inspector and then shift-click objects to add more. That causes the
>> alignment icon to appear at the top left of the inspector, and the other
>> icons will operate on all the selected objects.
>>
>
> I may have to print that out and hang it on the wall.
> Wow - the IDE used to be somewhat intuitive.
>

I confess my first reaction was that LC needs an interface designer.

But once it was explained to me, I understood the problem: how to allow 
the PB to act on objects that are not on the current card, while still 
representing the selected objects that are.

Part of me thinks the dotted lines and the selected lines are backwards; 
dotted suggests inactive, and the objects on the card are actively 
selected. There's 15 years of IDE history that enforces the idea that 
selected card objects should be hilited in the PB. But...the objects 
that will be acted on by the PB are also "active" in a different sense; 
they are the ones that the PB will change. So I flip-flop. I'm not sure 
how it should work.

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