Dragging widgets

Richmond Mathewson richmondmathewson at gmail.com
Tue Feb 28 17:28:54 EST 2017


Indeed:

On 2/28/17 11:27 pm, Quentin Long via use-livecode wrote:
>>> On Feb 28, 2017, at 07:14 , Sannyasin Brahmanathaswami via use-livecode <use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>>> an image is an image is an image, whether it is png, bitmap, jpg or svg, the fact that is is a "widget" is secondary to the use case.
>> sez Bob Sneidar <bobsneidar at iotecdigital.com>:
>> au contraire. Not all images are the same. Support for each kind of image has to be implemented. If the industry developed a new kind of image, LC would be faced with incorporating that format.
> It's true that *under the hood*, LC must handle each distinct 'flavor' of image differently. But why should *the user* be concerned about whether a given image is vector or raster or RLE or what?
>
> Consider: Numbers can be signed, unsigned, integer, or real, and the engine's internal workings must handle each of those 'flavors' of number differently. But in spite of those internal differences, *the expression "VarX + VarY" ALWAYS just works, REGARDLESS of which flavors of number VarX and VarY happen to be*.

Surely one of the points of LiveCode is to "protect" people who want to 
use a RAD tool from the "fiddly
bits". Ater all if we wanted to concern ourselves with the filldy bits 
we'd all be "out there" learning
C++, C#, Turbo-Whatsit and all the other programming languages that I, 
at least, have, thanks to LiveCode
so successfully managed to avoid for the last 15 years.

Now I am aware that LiveCode is in the process of trying to get itself 
taken seriously by the
hairy-chested programming brigade (real men don't do object-based 
stuff), but if that is at the price
of losing touch with their installed base of "unprogrammers" (and only 
"unprogrammers" in the sense
of being people who aren't high as kites on command-line only 
programming) as well as the very valuable niche they fill between the 
blockly community and the C++ community I belive they are making a big
mistake.

I couldn't tell you about the difference between big-Endian and 
little-Endian programming any more than
I could tell you about Michael Flatly's shoe size (what made me think of 
that example? I wonder). But I have
used LiveCode to produce quite a lot of useful stuff; and with the 
advent of SVG import and a lot of the
other exciting stuff that is on its way in LC 9 I hope to produce a lot 
more.

Nobody bothered to point out that if one opens an SVG image with a 
text-editor one can transfer its code into the prefs palette of the SVG 
widget; and I suspect they didn't because they knew full well that that
seriously sucks as a way to import an image!
>
> As far as *the user* is concerned, a number is a number is a number, and it *doesn't matter* whether a number happens to be real or integer or what. Why can't an image be an image be an image, *regardless* of whether an image happens to be JPG or bitmap or what?
>
>

The main stregth of Livecode is that one can go on believing in the 
illusion of the GUI.

Messing around with text-editors and images spoils that completely.

Richmond.



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