I didn't want to push any priority, I simply wanted to write it before I forget it again. Probably some clearly written and easily accessible documentation could prevented this in the future and I am glad that I can use the anchors and free positioning even with splitters and am not forced to use the Align property which would be diametrically opposing the visual GUI design paradigm.
On 21.08.2010 18:56, Martin wrote: > Anchors to me are same as (if not even more) confusing as the align method. Can you remember what exactly it was that confused you? I have seen a lot of approaches to GUI design and GUI designers with other toolkits, they all use either a set of sizers of varying complexity for certain purposes (box, grid, gridbag, etc) and you are supposed to study and learn all their advantages and disadvantages and detailed behavior and experiment a lot before you are able to make even the simplest hello world form with only a label and two buttons and usually most of the time you are more effective when doing it manually because they all inherently resist the usage of a visual GUI designer, most GUi designers that let you design with these sizers literally suck comets through drinking straws. And then there is the gigantic do-it-all-sizer-that-fits-all-needs approach of for example netbeans that lets you easily design a form with a real visual designer that really deserves its name but the code it produces looks extremely complicated. I don't know who exactly invented the way the form designer and the sizing with the anchors works like it is now in Lazarus but I must say that its invention was truly a masterstroke. I can hardly imagine any way to achieve more flexibility with less complexity. I don't see any complexity at all. Components can be placed and sized freely and each side can additionally be anchored to something or left alone and thats already all there is to it. How can this be perceived as more complex than the usual two dozen different nested sizers hell that is used in many other toolkits? I personally find the form designer and the anchoring is one of the best inventions since the invention of sliced bread. Bernd -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list [email protected] http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
