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I spent a few hours last night building screens. There are a few things that really slow down the creation of templates. Maybe I am missing an easier way or shortcut.
- The color picker doesn't let you type in the R, G, and B fields. I do see that I can copy / paste attributes, but that doesn't help when trying to replicate a color from another program / image.
- Snap to grid only works when you select a control and click it. I was hoping it was a check box like show grid and would make controls snap to the grid as you dragged them with the mouse. This make make placing controls easy and I wouldn't need to keep selecting snap to grid or the toolbar icon to give controls the same top coordinate.
- I don't see a way to enter the X and Y coordinates or a width and height for a control. If there was a toolbar with these fields I could select multiple controls and quickly change their position or size. For example when copy / pasting the font attributes to a larger size the text field controls height now needs to be increased.
- I don't see a way to center a control horizontally or vertically within the entire template.
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Some of those are certainly legitimate concerns. On the others, some things you can use are :
1. Drag the little mouse thingie over the other color and release. That's one way to steal another color.
2. There is a show grid to show/hide it quickly. But in the Configure menu there is an auto-snap and a way to set the grid size. If you enable auto-snap then it will do what you want.
3. You can't enter X/Y. You can change the size. Right click on it and select Set Size and you can either the values. You can also hold down ctrl and use the arrow keys to size up or down all selected widgets, and of course without control it just moves them together. Keep in mind also that they will paste to where the mouse is, so you can get them close to where they need to be by holding the mouse where you want the upper/left corner of their combined areas to go.
4. That is in fact not possible currently.
Dean Roddey
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With regard to centering something, sometimes I'll create a text box and make it as wide or tall as the template, then use the center dot to line up what I'm trying to center. I move it using the arrow buttons to the position I'd like it in.
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rsw686 Wrote:I spent a few hours last night building screens. There are a few things that really slow down the creation of templates. Maybe I am missing an easier way or shortcut.
- The color picker doesn't let you type in the R, G, and B fields. I do see that I can copy / paste attributes, but that doesn't help when trying to replicate a color from another program / image.
- Snap to grid only works when you select a control and click it. I was hoping it was a check box like show grid and would make controls snap to the grid as you dragged them with the mouse. This make make placing controls easy and I wouldn't need to keep selecting snap to grid or the toolbar icon to give controls the same top coordinate.
- I don't see a way to enter the X and Y coordinates or a width and height for a control. If there was a toolbar with these fields I could select multiple controls and quickly change their position or size. For example when copy / pasting the font attributes to a larger size the text field controls height now needs to be increased.
- I don't see a way to center a control horizontally or vertically within the entire template.
I've definitely been frustrated by #1 and #3 - those are too useful to be left out.
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+ 1 for what John said. Particularly the color picker, which is fairly unusefull when you are trying to match the color of the wall paint as an example. The field needs to be opened up to allow manual entry.
Thanks,
Dave Bruner
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I will also chime in for my vote for #3. I use that all the time in HouseBot to get things precisely where I want them.
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Precision in placing items on a screen is not always needed by using X and Y co-ordinates, and snap to grid is not the answer either.
I see this a lot with AutoCAD users - they rely on snap to grid so much that they can't actually draw properly becasue they don't use object snap.
There are a number of buttons on the toolbar to give the selected widgets the same top/left/right/bottom/center co-ordinate. There is also the distribute evenly vertically and horizontally.
I use these extensively to create my pages with everything lined up and distributed nicely around the page.
We need keyboard shortcuts for these buttons to make development faster (and many more shortcuts)
As for the centering a widget, I too use the same procedure as indicated, where there is one as wide as the page and all others are matched to its centre.
Mykel Koblenz
Illawarra Smart Home
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These things can be addressed in the 5.0 version. I just so happens that I'm working on the hot-key/menu access character stuff right now, and that's going to make it far easier to have everything hot-keyed up and menus showing the hot keys. In fact that accelerators that invoke the hot keys are gotten from the menus themselves. So I just have to set up hot keys on the menus appropriately, and they all are automatically active. This will reduce a lot of tedious work that I had to do before to support hot keys.
And definitely the Intf Des will move away from an attribute dialog box to a widget type away scrollable attribute bar on the right side, so that, as long as a single widget is selected, you'll be able to just jump over and make changes. I'm sure folks will like that a lot better as well.
Dean Roddey
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BTW, there's a couple 5.0 wish list threads in the beta discussions area. Mostly they have to be GUI oriented since the point of 5.0 is primarily to completely rewrite the UI. I'm well along on getting the underlying windowing framework rewritten in terms of the standard Window controls, throwing away my custom ones (sigh...)
I'm working on the first test programs, my own resource editor and then the log monitor program, to test out the work. So pretty soon here I'll be starting on the CQC UI programs. And I'm making other fundamental architectural changes that will be VERY useful in making the product more consistent and maintainable.
Dean Roddey
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Dean Roddey Wrote:And definitely the Intf Des will move away from an attribute dialog box to a widget type away scrollable attribute bar on the right side, so that, as long as a single widget is selected, you'll be able to just jump over and make changes. I'm sure folks will like that a lot better as well.
This sounds very useful Dean - thanks. I imagine this will look something like how Visual Studio does it?
I do use the alignment buttons in HouseBot, but I also regularly enter top/left/width/height values - I've found use cases for both.
