Another widget grumble

[Graham Samuel]

I’m still trying to use the ‘mobile native’ style of widget. Previously I’ve objected to the idea of an object that displays its name and has no label or alias. My objection was mostly that names that the user sees often have spaces in them (“Stop Now” or whatever), whereas names with spaces in them are dangerous to refer to in scripts because it’s so easy to put two in instead of one, and is either illegal or deprecated in almost all computer languages.

Today I came across an even more annoying aspect of this, when I added a facility to my app to change the language of the display. So a button in English displaying “Cancel” gets changed to “Annuler”. So if I need to refer to the button in script, the simplest way is to use its ID and not its name. The ID is a fine thing, but it doesn’t make for readable code!

Seriously, is there any chance of these widgets being improved by somebody? They just need more properties really.

Graham