Sample stacks / revOnline [was: Re: Suggestion: Non-Appbuilding Community Edition]

[Alex Tweedly]

On 30/09/2021 15:02, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode wrote:
> On 06/09/2021 15:14, Kevin Miller via use-livecode wrote:
>
>> Upgrading this could be a very useful project. There is a lot of 
>> content in there but it has the issues you list.

So I had a look at what could be done just within the IDE for revonline. 
There's an old joke about a tourist in Ireland who realizes she(*) is 
lost, and ask for directions from an old farmer at the side of the road. 
"Well", says he, "if I wanted to go there, I wouldn't start from here."

I found the revonline scripts rather complex, and I couldn't easily see 
how to solve the issues mentioned previously, in that context. And the 
bottom line is that it's not a complex problem that needs to be solved. 
The login / register / upload features all work just fine - the problems 
are with the searching / browsing / filtering, and are generally related 
to either (very) poor performance or unclear UI.

In the end, I just couldn't produce worthwhile improvements, so instead 
I wrote a plugin that handles the searching / filtering / browsing / 
downloading parts, and which omits the login/upload parts entirely.

It can be downloaded from "Sample Stacks" in the IDE toolbar (it's 
called "Sample Stacks" and is tagged as IDE and Plugin). Install as a 
plugin in the usual way.

UI is very similar to the existing IDE version - simplified a bit.

  - search box automatically (and immediately) updates as you type, so 
the "Go" button was removed

- everything happens in < 1 second, so the progress bar was removed.

  - the grid/list choice was removed (the old 'list' stye was hard to 
use or understand)

  -  tags in the left-hand box are alphabetized

  - the grid is a single long scrolling group, rather than being paged 
and scrolled

There is one issue I haven;t tracked down yet - sometimes the scrolling 
using mousepad doesn't work initially; scrolling with the scrollbar 
seems to be enough to "revive" it.

Let me know if you try it and have any problems or suggestions.

Thanks

Alex.




(*) "she" is not sexist - had it been a man he would never have admitted 
to being lost and so would never have asked the question :-)