Mobile screen sizes - another naive question

[Alex Tweedly]

Richard,

it wasn't that you over-wrote it - the problem was I over-thought it.

My excuse is that I have been thinking quite a bit this last week about 
whether there was a (simple enough) approach to layout that would allow 
"rows & columns" semi-flow layout to be nearly automatic, and be 
possible to provide a UI that would make it practical (and quick) to 
provide extra guidance to such a system.

You message just happened to fit into that thought exercise - causing me 
to over-complicate things.

So my apologies. I think what you wrote was perfectly clear, it just 
didn't happen to be the same as I was working on :-)

Alex.

On 28/04/2020 16:22, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> Very good thoughts there, Alex.
>
> The assumptions you list would be important to keep in mind if one 
> were aiming to generalize basic layout handling, with libraries that 
> have nicely-designed APIs, or even further with virtual props that 
> would lend themselves well to reducing things further to simple 
> point-and-click authoring.
>
> But in this exercise I'm making no assumptions at all; I'm just 
> looking at the UI and writing purpose-built code to make it do what I 
> want.
>
> And with only a dozen lines, why not?
>
> There's good value in generalizing app development.  Data binding is 
> ripe with unexplored opportunities, as are field entry validation, 
> window management, menu management, exception handling and reporting, 
> socket comms, and many other things we write.
>
> Sometimes we make tools or libraries to reduce the scripting we would 
> use to deliver those.
>
> Sometimes we generalize far enough to reduce it further to assigning 
> the desired behavior with property settings which would then lend 
> themselves to a point-and-click development workflow.
>
> But often we just write a few lines of script to do what we want to do 
> for the case at hand and be done with it.
>
> The draft Lesson I posted serves only as a reminder that placing 
> objects where we want them isn't all that deep, and if we use groups 
> well we can reduce that scripting even farther.
>
> That this wasn't clear in the writing suggests the draft is possibly 
> too long.  "Set the loc of <object> to <loc>" doesn't really require a 
> whole page.
>
> Different apps require different code. Layout is the least of it. 
> LiveCode is a scripting language.  We script.
>
> And when we look at the apps we use from others, regardless what tool 
> they're written in, we see those authors do the same thing: they look 
> at their layout, consider what they want to communicate to the user, 
> and put things where they want them to support that.
>
> What I had tried to convey was that putting things where you want them 
> is neither mysterious nor difficult in a nice language like LC.  
> Clearly I overwrote.
>