roundRadius as a property of buttons

[richmond62]

The standard Round Radius button in Livecode looks something like Mac OS system 7; frankly awful:

Mac Round Rect btn

macRR.png (5.44 KiB) Viewed 7387 times

Linux Round Rect btn

LinuxRR.png (5.75 KiB) Viewed 7387 times

And not, honestly acceptable as of 2014.

Now the standard buttons look like this on Mac and Linux, respectively:

buttonz.png (11.34 KiB) Viewed 7387 times

if "roundRadius" were added to the properties of buttons it would be very easy to make
"Aqua" Round Rect buttons in Livecode.

[richmond62]

Here's an illustration of why Home-brew tactics don't really work:

AQUA.zip

(2.31 KiB) Downloaded 165 times

[richmond62]

Just out of interest I had a bash with Xojo (the IDE previously known as Prince; err, Real BASIC).

On a Mac buttons are only resizeable width-wise, but on Linux they can go both ways:
no much one can do re Rounded Rectangles though:

Xojo on Mac 10.8

Xojo on Linux (XFCE)

Frankly these are even less satisfactory than Livecode's buttons.

[Mag]

Thank you for all your interesting posts. I think that LiveCode gives you a lot of control-creation freedom than other developer platforms, anyway would be great if the LiveCode team could implement some more pre-made options. This is the current situation. No doubt about that the most important lack is the Toolbar control.

[Mag]

Hi Richmond, Push buttons when resized above of a specific value in LiveCode becomes Square buttons. In Xojo (what kind of name is that?) you can use a Square button too. Perhaps in this there is not much difference between the new REALbasic/REALstudio and LiveCode. The biggest differences are in the reliability and compactness. There LiveCode wins without problems...

[richmond62]

The problem is, as you can see above, that simply
scaling buttons doesn't work.

These were done in GIMP rather than my silly stack I uploaded yesterday.

What is needed is a way to:

1. stop the 'aqua' buttons just going flat as soon as they are resized on Macintosh:

Enlarged 'aqua' button on a Mac.

crud.png (1.5 KiB) Viewed 7257 times

2. Introducing roundRadius as a property of Buttons so that the corners can be rounded
to differing extents, on all platforms.

[richmond62]

I would suppose once the new vector shape is implemented:

http://livecode.com/community/roadmap/ [under 'Queued']

"Vector Shape Object
The new vector shape object will provide rich vector support, use of SVG and sub pixel drawing accuracy

which might be quite a way down the pike,

we will be able to mess around with resizing images and so forth in
a way which will make this problem with round-edged buttons
redundnat.

However, I suspect that both the folk at RunRev and all of us will
get quite a bit more round-shouldered before that arrives.

[richmond62]

Interestingly enoug; while I was taking a poke at Xojo (the IDE previously known as Real BASIC)
I had a thought about where RunRev got this from:

The attachment dreamOf Avalon.png is no longer available

Here is Xojo (on Linux):

Interesting, What, What?

[FourthWorld]

Most GUI IDE's use a similar layout, from VB to NetBeans and many more, for decades:
https://www.google.com/search?q=gui+IDE&tbm=isch

The question I have for the RunRev team member who put their screen shot together is: how does one maintain the "live" in LiveCode if you're working on a proxy mock-up rather than live windows?

That common UI layout is mostly useful in IDEs that have a compile-runtime cycle, where it's fine to work only on a mock-up of your layout since it can't actually be run until you wait for the compiler, where it will then run in a completely separate environment.

What LiveCode brings to the table is the end of the compile-runtime cycle, giving us truly live code, in which the windows we're working with are the very same windows we run.

Given this, how does the old-school proxy mock-up figure into the workflow?

[richmond62]

https://www.google.com/search?q=gui+IDE&tbm=isch

Wow: what a bad case of convergence.

I always liked Livecode because of its WYSIWYG interface . . .

[richmond62]

Honestly, having had a poke about in Xcode (makes me appreciate Livecode like anything),
what would be LOVELY would be all of these buttons:

The attachment MacBtnz.png is no longer available

[richmond62]

This is well worth a read:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac ... 000359-TP6

I'd certainly never heard about a 'Scope button' until I read that.

ct_recessedscope.jpg (3.13 KiB) Viewed 7109 times

Other places to do reading:

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios ... index.html

https://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/

And; specially for Andre Garzia !!! : http://api.haiku-os.org/HIG/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Aa511258.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 65424.aspx

Looks familiar :P

Win8butts.png (9.56 KiB) Viewed 7109 times

[richmond62]

http://uxmovement.com/buttons/call-to-a ... ces-guide/

tryItNow.png (11.71 KiB) Viewed 7108 times

[richmond62]

Toolbook is, most definitely, less of a programming environment than
Livecode, but more of a LEGO kit.

Which makes me wonder . . .

It provides a vast number of premade objects,

74 types of text object,

but, an extremely limited number of buttons,

which, obviously, both take a lot of donkey work off the back of the end-user,
AND, cramp the imaginative style of the end-user . . .

Now, whether that is a bad or good thing is hard to say . . .

However . . with reference to Dar Scott and others,

I begin to wonder if, as Livecode gets increasingly capable of extremely sophisticated things,

if it is not time for a 2-tier interface:

1. An interface with a vast number of premade objects with preprogrammed capabilities rather like Toolbook and . . . [apologies in advance] . . . Powerpoint.

2. Our current interface, or even a reduced one somewhat like the Metacard one.

When I have taught programming to Primary kids I have found they divide into two groups

(about 25% to 75%)

those who want to control everything through programming objects via scripts

and

those who want the plug-n-play, programming-as-LEGO-blocks kids.

Of course, as an intellectual snob I favour the first 25%.

Notwithstanding that, if Livecode has any serious pretensions to "Power to the People"
it might like to consider the needs of the second group . . . especially not when it comes
to a bunch of school kids who are paying Richmond to keep their kids off the streets
in June-July, but when it comes to end-users who (c.f. my Master's thesis from Abertay)
are interested in delivering an end-product relating to their subject area without having
to go to great lengths to learn a programming language first.

[shawnblc]

xojo is a nice platform. I'm giving it a shot, actually spend more time with it right now than LC.