Performance Issue Related to Gradients/Graphic Effects

[Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami]

There is a common UI element seen everywhere these days:

https://quality.livecode.com/show_bug.cgi?id=21801

A small photo or image, say 150px W x 85px H, the lower part of the photo,  at about 65px down, begins a gradient going to close to black near to bottom on the image. On top of that there is a Label/Text, which is in White. By virtue of the gradient behind, the text is clear and legible, even though it’s on photo with a lot of "noise".  The user hardly see that gradient, these a navigation elements, click and go.

I built this  into a new interface for navigation (getting away from scrolling) in SivaSiva app. Thinking "the is so cool, what the users wants all navigation, top of the fold, one place."

But oh boy…I took an enormous performance slow down on Android. At first I thought it was my "child like coding" that was getting me trouble. I refactored everything. The UI behavior is less then 100 line long, not hard on the engine… stumped…. I asked Elanor to look into it.

It took her a while but it seems it the graphic effect and gradients causing the trouble! So if you are struggling with getting a group to hide and show "immediately" or you leave the card and come back to it and have  a huge 2-3 second delay in mobile. It may not but your code, but the visual effects on the card.

We can of course, put the gradient in photoshop. But that a real nuisance… every time I want swap out the image (very easy to do in LiveCode just) I have go "mess with it" in Photoshop? Not doable in the long run.

If anyone else has this trouble, vote of the Bug to fix it ASAP in the next release of 9.0.3 RC 1 (or whatever the next release, even a quick patch would be useful.) We can't afford for this to go on a "2 year queue" …. The eye candy people in my "stack holders" review group expect top notch graphic look and feel (they look at web apps run on web kit and they see "beautiful" effect / transition all the time and wonder why I can't get that in LiveCode)

<rant>my usual thing: LiveCode can run universities, help NASA with their satellites, run whole water systems for entire cities, run Filemake Databases…. I think you get can put a hold on the backend business engineering, and please, please make put scrolling, transitions, keyburns effects.. on the top of the list etc. every thing  about the graphics look and feel needs to be "2019" . It the first thing newbies expect when they test Livecode and the first thing the CEO (stakeholder) sees from a seasoned developed when he opens the app, "Why is it so clunky?" </rant>

BR