Elastic Window up for grabs?

Sorry if my post came out this way. I did not intend to look mad.

Mostly true, except that IDE problems are ironed out one by one. Like the copy/cut/paste in the Windows IDE. Give them a chance.

[quote=118951:@Alain Bailleul]B4A forum: Discussions: 40,412, Messages: 258,568, Members: 60,431, Active: 139
Xojo forum: Discussions: 12,862, Messages: 110,035, Members: 8,710, Active: 19

And about quality? A discussion like this would not even be accepted as a valid one on B4A by Erel. Almost every message is on topic, questions, answers while on this forum I have to use the filter on top to get real topics.[/quote]

I may have another point of view. If you look at the reasons people post, it is most of the time to ask questions because they did not understand something, or have difficulties with bugs. And the quality of documentation plays a role in helping people find the information they need before they post a question. Could it be that Xojo had a much better documentation (Thanks Paul) with easy to apply examples, which minimize the need to ask questions ? B4A is great, but documentation is not quite up to par with Xojo’s, IMHO.

All too often, when a thread gets locked, people scream censorship. Indeed, Erel does not tolerate much. But maybe his forums loose a lot in terms of humanity.

Looks like it, but it could be the holidays. Or the fact that some heavy contributors are so busy Alpha Testing iOS that most of their participation is no longer public, but reserved to the Alpha channel :wink:

Indeed. I will try to refrain next time.

People are happiest when their expectations are exceeded. I’m afraid most RB developers had high expectations when Xojo first came out and were met with a steeper than expected learning curve and lots of bugs. For the first year, I pretty much ignored Xojo. If it weren’t for the improvements in the web apps, I’d still be using RB2012r2.1 and would have ditched Xojo. Once I figured out the relationship between the navigator and the tab bar, everything fell into place and I have moved almost all my projects to Xojo. I’m happy now.

@Michel Bujardet No need to apologize, I’m sorry too :slight_smile: I always valued your opinions on the forums.

Definitely true. And I’m to blame myself. I wrote several libs for the B4A community and haven’t documented them well enough either. My problem is I spend half of the year developing for PC, the other half for mobile devices. And when I am working on one of them, I somehow neglect supporting the other part. To eager to do the new stuff. Hey, now that I think about it, maybe our Xojo overlords suffer from the same disease as me :wink:

Great example of how can get the wrong view about Xojo. I completely removed tabs out of my brain (and IDE) because in the beginning of Xojo it drove me crazy that several tabs had the same name and values. I had to remove them to stay sane.

Your message reminded me of them so I activated them again. Seems to have changed a lot since then. (or is it me?) A nice feature (aaargh Alain, don’t give them more features to program!) would be to allow a multiple selection of classes/modules/forms in the navigator and drag them to the tab section to open them.

I used bookmarks a lot in other IDE’s and miss them in Xojo too.

+1
:wink:

Here’s the feedback item, vote it up: " Feedback #33898 - Simple yet efficient bookmark mechanism using gutter"

It’s ranked 25th, not like it is some odd ball feature request. All we need is the ability to tag code line with little blue squares and the ability to show them a list, the same way the breakpoints are.

Good to hear! My main thing right now is the issue with the IDE greatly slowing down after 3-4 hours of work in it. It happens consistently, so it probably is a memory leak. I have Windows 8.1 with an i7 processor, 8GB RAM and not much running in the background either. I only run 1 instance of Xojo at a time too. After3-4 hours, it slows to a crawl and I have to restart it. It’s been documented by several others too. Has this been addressed that you know of with 2014r2.1?

Not that I am aware of. I generally don’t run the IDE that long with out a restart for other reasons, so I am not the best person to ask that. The copy and paste issues were what was driving me bonkers and it is much more stable now, I can cut, copy, and paste at will and it does what I expect it to do.

Done :slight_smile:

Getting back to Elastic Window. I wish someone would pick this tool up and refine it for Xojo Cocoa. A lot of the controls will not format correctly with Cocoa builds.

I really liked Elastic Window and I would gladly pay for an upgrade to the versions I have. When you develop for everything from cheap Netbooks to 2560 x 1440 Apple Displays you need to be able to scale the window as well as the controls to fit the screen proportionally. This is especially true if you have a window with a whole bunch of controls. Locking just does not do the job.

I don’t understand why Xojo did not build this in from the beginning, but I am not very confident it will be included anytime soon. I would think people developing for all sorts of screen sizes would want to use Elastic Window. Unless the window layout is very simple, I don’t understand how you get away with not using it.

Here is one customer who would buy the upgrade if you got the Cocoa builds working correctly.

Check out what Autolayout does
We’ve already said thats where we’re going

In 13 years of Xojo development I’ve never used Elastic Window and, as you can imagine, I have have done some very complicated screen layouts. I do code layout changes as necessary.

We tend to use a ton of Containers which means that we can control the layout on each container more efficiently than on a single window. Makes it easier to code to but that’s just my opinion.

Xojo Inc is working on AutoLayout which is in alpha testing now with iOS. This will eventually make it into web and desktop and it will do pretty much what you’re talking about.

Just wondering when we will see Autolayout in the Desktop version. Will it be a matter of days, weeks, months or years? Thats why if Elastic Window could be tweaked for Cocoa, it may be a short-term solution, but I guess no one is interested in working on it if its marketability will be measured by how quickly Xojo is able to implement Autolayout on the desktop.

It will most likely be years. It’s not even out for iOS yet.

I’ll be honest, I thought about acquiring it but since we don’t use ElasticWindow it is of limited appeal. However, it might be a good fit as a product for you since you already use it and know what needs to be updated for Cocoa. Nothing like being a regular user of a product to make selling it a side business.

Hi Bob,

Years is a little too long for me.

I have enough projects I need to work on to last me for years. :slight_smile: Also don’t think I’m smart enough to fix it.

The main problem I have with it under Cocoa is the buttons. When using a 2560 x 1440 resolution monitor, when you switch to full screen the buttons get super small. The type in the button resizes but the button itself stays the same height. The same holds true for the popup menus and combo boxes. With high-resolution monitors the height of the controls do not change, just the text within them.

I could work around the combo boxes by just using a text box with a List box. List boxes size well under Cocoa.

Just need the buttons to size right. I wrote Christian about it a few times, but never received an answer. I guess if it was easy to fix, Christian would have done it.

Jim