fullscreenmode and rect of a substack on mobile device ?

[J. Landman Gay]

On 8/20/18 8:32 PM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> Swami has not asked me to evaluate strategies for precise control of his 
> layouts.  That would not be possible until I see how things are 
> constructed.

He estimated months, and that sounds about right. Every card is laid out 
differently. The project is gigantic.

> Just yesterday I delivered a UI with several hundred controls on a card, 
> some quite deeply nested within groups.  But the layout did not require 
> writing anywhere close to one line per object.  Some was handled in 
> loops, others handled by simply grouping objects and placing the group. 
> Some don't need to be moved at all because their natural placement 
> relative to topleft need not change.  Others were handled by 
> combinations of the above in reusable behaviors.

It's not always like that. Like the sample stack we were working on 
here, just moving a group doesn't always work. The group needs to be 
resized, as do all its components. Field properties often need to be 
managed manually, text sizes and heights adjusted. Loops are fine if 
you're dealing with grid-type things, but useless when no two objects 
are the same. FSM manages all that without any scripts at all.

Auto-resizing does require an awareness during initial layout of how 
fullscreenMode works. The objections you've raised can all be dealt with 
if you're a stickler for HIG (which even the companies who publish them 
don't follow. They're just guidelines.)

I'm not saying FSM is the be-all and end-all, and as we've seen here 
there may be cases where manual adjustment is necessary, but for what I 
mostly do it's a lifesaver.

> We're scripters; we generally enjoy scripting. But reasons I 
> don't yet understand, writing the relatively small part of the code to 
> deliver a precise UI annoys people to the point of spending a multiple 
> of the time the task requires trying to find ways of avoiding the task.

In my experience this is exactly backwards, maybe because we develop 
different types of apps. The core code goes pretty quickly, and manual 
scaling takes more time than anything else. Even if the lines of script 
aren't overwhelmingly numerous (though sometimes they are) the 
calculations are a time sink. It usually takes more than just aligning 
the rects of controls on a card. Maybe that's not true for things like 
utility apps or straightforward layouts, but for multimedia and games 
you can't just put the top of one thing at the bottom of another; it's 
all percentages and ratios and placement of objects in a calculated area 
of the screen. Compare that against doing nothing at all except for a 
single line of code and there's no contest.

I suppose people are pretty tired of this conversation now, but the 
reason I keep answering is because I really believe that FSM is one of 
the greatest boons the team has given us, and it's saved me hours and 
hours of effort. I'd be sorry if users think they have to spend all that 
time scripting individual objects and writing repeat loops. It doesn't 
have to be that hard (and it is hard. It's tedious and tiresome and 
fiddly and not at all fun.)

There is a quick and gentle way to get your apps on any device with much 
less effort. If people don't like the default results, it is still 
possible to adjust the fiddly stuff as needed while allowing the engine 
to do most of the work.

Tell you what. Let's have one of our friendly chats some time and I'll 
will either convince you or hit you over the head with my goody bag at 
the next conference. :P

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