On 12/7/05 2:36 AM, "Bill Marriott" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Bill, I think your final sentences really summed up your thoughts on this: > Modern look-and-feel is undeniably one > of Revolution's weaknesses. Improving this is one component of several > things Rev should do to be successful and attract the next generation of > developers. And to this statement, I agree 100%. However related to additionalControls, as Jacque mentioned, and I'll reiterate here, I think the issues are that Rev doesn't come *prepackaged* with the controls that you've identified, and that would certainly make life easier for us as developers. However some of the controls you identified aren't even in the basic development package fro something like VB Express 2005, and are supported by 3rd-party add-ons, or by adding code to handle what you need (like calendar popups, notification tray support, etc.). I totally agree that these are hallmarks of current apps, and with tools like VB Express and a large 3rd party marketplace you have the ability to get all these things in place for development. But Rev has a much smaller user base, and there is currently no easy way to create custom controls (like the ones you see in ActiveX) as "plugins" for Rev. Sure, you can script them and put out libraries that support them (heck, I do that myself!) but it's not quite the same, and our "controls" are still exposed to manipulation and modification by the end user. In Rev's defense, we also have the tools we need to create most of these "controls" from scratch so that *to the user* it appears as though we're using the proper controls. I mean I have table, toolbar, icon list, treeview, etc. controls that I've hand built that look exactly like their "real" counterparts. However not having these are easy "plug-and-play" controls mean that these things are not in a lot of applications that have been developed simply because of the time it takes to create them. But to your point - making controls by hand means that they don't get recognized by the OS so that theme changes, etc. don't take effect - which looks bad to the user. So in a sense I feel it's the fact that "real" controls aren't built-in, or easily able to be created by third parties, that causes Rev to appear behind the times. > Look at the menus in Microsoft Office 2003. That is the current state of the > art. Look how Visual Basic Express creates menus that look exactly like > those. Now as to menus, I personally wouldn't look at Office 2003, or *any* Office application for an example of the "current state of the art" - the reason is that MS changes its mind in the UI each time it creates a new version of Office, and I've noticed that third party developers are not even trying to match Office anymore, but are just happy with matching the basic UI support in the OS (that is, WordPad, Explorer, etc.), or just matching whatever they can in MS Office. And VB Express? Well, Microsoft created it, so you'd better believe they're going to make the UI match. But you're right that icons in menus have been around for a long time and we need that ability as well, regardless of how MS does it's thing. Once again, this can be hand-rolled, but it's subject to the same issues as mentioned for non-"real" controls. Now some of these other items, Jacque tackled, but I wanted to make you aware that there *is* a third-party browser control for Rev - it's called altBrowser and put out by Altuit. And I have a notification tray application for Windows that can be used with Rev (or any app that can create a text file) but not seamlessly. And one thing to keep in mind that RunRev needs to deal with, and that is that every time they add something to the package, it needs to be working cross-platform (at least to the current versions of Windows, Mac OS X, and some flavor of Linux), so each addition takes 3x the effort (give-or-take), *unless* it's a platform-specific addition (like Spotlight support). So it will by definition take them longer to implement. Bottom line is that you're right that we need these things in the package, and that we need better abilities to create add ons for Rev that the OS will recognize as "real" controls. And so your final statement (which I quoted at the beginning of this post), is completely right, IMHO. Ken Ray Sons of Thunder Software Web site: http://www.sonsothunder.com/ Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list use-revolution@lists.runrev.com Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution