LiveCode Forums.

Hi Everyone,

I'm a new user of Livecode and am sharing some of my first impressions here which may be a bit random and wrong as I get to use RunRev.

I've just installed LiveCode on a windows XP machine and Ubuntu10.10 running in VMware.

Visual Appearance
The main RunRev website looks very slick and well designed, giving me the impression that LiveCode applications would look just as Slick. I'm slightly disappointed with the "out of the box" results as illustrated below.

I've downloaded some of the demo apps from RevOnline and they do look a bit dated with buttons fonts etc looking a few years out of date. Now I understand that a lot of these examples do seem to be quite old (5 years or so).
Is it possible to globally apply a "style" or "Skin" to applications to bring them up to looking more modern? I fully understand that changes in fonts, Font size etc might require slight re working of the layout.

On Ubuntu the styling is just not quite there here are some images to highlight what I means, Firstly here is the standard Ubuntu calculator with a menu selected

compare this to a menu selected in Livecode

The issues I see are
1. The system font doesn't seem quite right its too bunched up. Maybe its the wrong font or slightly too small?
2. The orange highlighting has the corners slightly clipped
3. The Calculator has a dark brown background to the menu's Live code has a grey background.

I know this seems a bit picky but I would like the environment to develop applications that followed the style guides of the target platform. Its all about first impressions as I'm sure iOS developers know. It may be that I just have to change some settings somewhere, I'm just not sure what and where. If I create a quick application then to test the Gui then it exhibits the same effects as above. I presume I can change a lot of this behaviour by adjusting the properties of the text etc of each control. Is it not possible to do this globally? If so why is it not done by default. Also it would give a better impression if the LiveCode IDE was compiled so that it followed the style guide of the platform.

I do not have access to a Mac so do not know how closely LiveCode follows the the style guides of this platform.

Cheers

Martin

Thank you for your post. Picky is good, IMO, since such details really help make the stuff we build with LC more attractive to potential customers, and of course benefits RunRev directly too since the product appearance is just as important for them.

In general I think you'll find the UI much more HIG-savvy on Windows and OS X than it is on Linux right now. There are historical reasons for this we can get into later if needed, but in short the issue now is that with Lnux having less than 2% of the desktop market RunRev already puts strongly disproptionate resources into their Linux engine and it's been difficult to put any more people on it in light of more pressing priorities like Android and iOS.

That said, in the last year the engine team at RunRev has indeed been devoting favorably disproportionate time to their Linux engine, and it's been significantly improved in both appearance and stability.

Based on the activity I see in the bug reports in Rev's Quality Control Center, I have good confidence this effort will continue as the team brings the Linux engine closer in parity to the overall quality of the Win and Mac engines.

In the meantime, I may be able to help with a couple of the items you mentioned, at least as far as your own apps are concerned:

mhoneywill wrote:The issues I see are
1. The system font doesn't seem quite right its too bunched up. Maybe its the wrong font or slightly too small?

This seems related to a long-standing conflict between the various layers that make up font rendering in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based distros - background on this with some links to other discussions on this is here:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ide ... ser/135521

I did some testing a while back on fonts and other UI rendering issues, and those results are posted here:
http://fourthworldlabs.com/revfonts/

In short, while the issue isn't entirely Rev's fault, it's not insurmountable. In your own apps you can check "the platform" and if running on Linux you can set the textSize of your controls a little higher.

For my own apps I tend to use font sizes larger than the OS X spec of 11 points anyway, as many of my users complain that 11 pts is just too small on modern high-res systems (Apple, can you hear us?).

I don't generally make them as large as other controls in Ubuntu, since frankly I feel the Ubuntu team is wrong on this, that there's just too much wasted space with controls rendered so unusually large. But I do try to get close in a way that provides as useful medium for the platforms I deploy to.

2. The orange highlighting has the corners slightly clipped

Excellent observation. I've flagged that as a bug in the RQCC:
http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=9405

3. The Calculator has a dark brown background to the menu's Live code has a grey background.

This is another area that we can address in our own scripts, though it may be worth noting that even with Ubuntu using standard Gnome themes a great may of the apps I download through the Ubuntu Software Center don't honor the current theme any more than LiveCode does (I just installed FreeMind last night, and IIRC that's one of them).

There are probably shell commands you can use in your app to discover specific theme settings and apply them to your objects, but I've found that in some cases, like getting the orange hilite color Ubuntu enjoys, you can get those from setting a button's "default" property and then getting "the colors" of that control to obtain the info you need for hiliting and more.

This level of effort takes a bit of extra time and like other things requires a bit of forking for the current platform in your code. But while so many Linux apps don't bother, I know from reading the Ubuntu forum daily that folks really appreciate when developers do.

Thanks again for your excellent post. As you find other anomalies in the Linux engine please note them here, and if they're not already in the RQCC I'll happily post them there so they can be addressed.

Thanks Richard,

I'm glad I'm not alone, I would agree with you apps on XP and Windows7 do look much closer to the interface guidelines.

Its just sometimes when you get a button that is slightly too small or the text is offset it just doesn't look right.

Do you have to be a special user to gain access to the Quality Control Center? I saw your link http://quality.runrev.com/qacenter/show_bug.cgi?id=9405 but I couldn't login, and could see nowhere to sign up. I'm guessing special access is required. Seems a shame if ordinary users can't file bug reports (But I guess some bug reports might just be users not knowing how to use the product)