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Re: more containers of widgets [message #8185 is a reply to message #8183]

Thu, 15 February 2007 04:21

darrs
Messages: 5
Registered: October 2006
Location: New Zealand

Promising Member

Quote:

What were the other problems with Fox?

It's been a while, but some of the things I still remember are:

a) Probably the biggest problem was the way the cut/paste (clipboard) was implemented. Often it would "lose" the text in the clipboard when cutting from one part of a Fox application and pasting into another part of the same Fox application. For example cutting text from one cell in a table and trying to paste into another cell. This was very annoying as it was very noticable by the customers.

[This wasn't a bug but a consequence of the way things were done. i.e. there was probably no way to fix apart from rewriting the clipboard sub-system].

b) Some problems with keyboard focus and using applications using the keyboard. For example in one dialog no matter what I did the focus would always start on one of the spin buttons inside a "EditIntSpin" widget rather than on the actual text part. Again very noticable to the customers.

c) No help system for the applications.

d) Inconsistency between widgets. For example many styling options (e.g. insert frame) only worked on some widgets and not others, some layout options would act differently for different types of widgets.

e) Some problems with keyboard accelerators. For example in a Wizard type dialog, the accelerators for the other "hidden" panes would collect the keystrokes. [Note: I think I noticed something similar in the tab dialog example in UPP. Will look into that when I get a chance.]

f) Lack of flexibility / control in some of the bigger widgets. For example in one application I had to copy the "table" and "file-open-dialog" implementations and do a lot of copy changes to get the necessary behavior. (Of course in some cases this may have been my lack of knowledge of how things were meant to be done.)

g) I kept running into things that I couldn't easily do. I have a number of little projects that are half done and then got stuck somewhere. (Once I have more experience with UPP I'll try these in UPP and see how I go).

h) The looks are definitely Win-98 based. Until recently that didn't bother me too much. But now with Win-XP so common it is something I care more about.

i) Missing various things I wanted.

Fox also has good points. When you get the layout options right (sometimes by long trial and error) the results are very good. Users could adjust fonts, window sizes, frames, etc. and things would re-adjust themselves properly. For example buttons would know how much space they really need (based on font and actual text) and would try to get that if possible.

Fox also has a mechanism for disabling "commands" automatically. You can provide functions to decide if a particular command ID should be enabled or not. These functions get called automatically by the GUI framework when becoming idle. If for example you indicate that this command is now disabled the GUI would automatically gray out all the associated buttons, menus, and widgets.

Fox has some things that UPP is currently missing (e.g. Drag and Drop) and visa-versa. On the whole I think UPP provides more things than Fox (although it is sometimes hard to find them in UPP). Note however that I haven't looked at Fox for a while (maybe a year).

Cheers,
Darrin.

PS. I should probably mention that my job is an embedded systems programmer. I only do small GUI stuff for work (e.g. configuration tools), and some small applications in my spare time. I don't write big PC applications.

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