screen artifacts on small laptop

[Timothy Miller]

Back again,

I'll try to keep it down to three or four times a day, max <g>

Screen artifacts on my laptop (a Pismo - Apple) have been quite a 
problem lately. Fields and buttons often pile up on top of each 
other, in the vertical dimension. It doesn't seem to happen on my 
desktop machine with a much bigger screen. Otherwise, everything 
seems to be working very well.

This occurs with stacks too tall to fit on the laptop screen, only 14 
inch. I deal with this by using scalable stacks and scrolling groups. 
I have to use 800 X 600 screen resolution. With higher resolution, 
the small text is just too tiny.

The easiest way to force a redraw that I've found so far is go go to 
another card and return. This is somewhat inconvenient, because it is 
necessary rather often. I've been wondering about a more convenient 
way to force a re-draw. I guess I could install a "redraw" button in 
the group. Maybe "set lockscreen to true, go next, go prev, set 
lockscreen to false..."

Is there an obviously better method?

If the text-entry cursor is in a field, it would be nice to find it 
in the same place after the redraw. That's probably possible...

I've wondered if there is a reasonable way to get the window to 
redraw itself periodically, maybe once every few seconds, without 
changing the position of the text entry cursor, or interfering too 
much with text entry.

On scrollbarDrag is another possibility. (That way, I might not need 
to worry about the location of the text entry cursor.) That makes 
some sense because using the scrollbar seems to cause the artifacts. 
But the scrollbarDrag message gets sent many times when you move the 
scrollbar, even a little bit, so it probably isn't a good idea.

The other option is to just "keep it simple, stupid" I.e., manually 
navigate to next card and back again, whenever I need a redraw. These 
stacks do have navigation buttons.


What do you recommend?


Thanks in advance,


Tim