Constructor is now virtually grinding to a halt with the large project I am working on. I had seen sporadic symptoms of these problems earlier, but as one of my more complex forms got past the point of about 50 elements, constructor has rapidly deteriorated to the point where it is barely usable. It now takes as long as 4-5 seconds (!) toactually select an item on the form after tapping on it. I tried opening a new project and copy/pasting everything except the form bitmaps, and the speed suddenly went back to being instantaneous, but after importing the form bitmaps, suddenly back to the 4-5 seconds. There is no apparent reason why just bringing in these bitmaps (they are mostly just bitmaps for buttons) would cause constructor to croak. with four bitmap families, it slows to about 1 second. At about 10 bitmap families, it's up to 4-5 seconds. I tried adding 20+ bitmap families and it was up to 20 seconds (!).Clearly there is some silly loop in the program that no one has noticed because they never created more than one or two bitmap families?? And of course these delays make things pretty unmanageable. You can no longer move items with the cursor keys because it takes 4-5 seconds to repaint the move on each repetition. Even Dragging and moving the item is difficult because of the long delay before anything happens. The second and very annoying deficiency is that of re-assigning resource ID's. It is often convenient to set up Bitmap resources so the resource ID and bitmap ID are the same (because of some oddities with the API, it really does make things work nicer). But wretched constructor INSISTS on re-assigning those ID's. So if you set up five new bitmaps with resource ID's of 1050, 1051, 1052 so they are nice and sequential (useful if you have things you are trying to index), as soon as you close out the file, constructor decides to renumber all the ID's based upon the lowest unused resource ID. WHY is it doing this? Is this a bug? It's just hard to imagine any clonk thinking this would be useful feature! But it makes managing complex forms a complete nightmare. As it is, rather than use straight indices in my program, I am now forced to keep a mapping array to map indices to the actual resource ID's - a complete waste of space and effort. Sometimes when opening this complex form, Constructor complains that it does not recognize the version of the program used to create it, but then when opening it again, it works fine. I really don't like programs that work one time and then fail under identical conditions as it is usually indicative of random memory reads of non-initialized data. Another symptom is that when you click on an item, the attributes are no longer refreshed and updated in the left-hand pane (layout Properties) - whatever was there before stays in the left pane. At that point, you are hosed and have to exit constructor. However, at this point, you can select File/Exit from the menu, but nothing happens - the title bar stays on the screen. There is no entry in the task bar, you can hit CTRL/ALT/DEL to bring up the Task manager, but no listing for constructor. Fortunately, I have TaskInfo2000 (a quality shareware offering) that can get rid of it altogether, but that's yet another bizarre thing that is happening. Is anyone else having these kinds of problems on more complex forms - especially with a lot of bitmap graphics? ____ ____ / ___) / ___) ( (___ ( (___ \____)heers! \____)ESD Pimlico Software, Inc. Home of DateBk4, DateBk3 & WeekView: http://www.PimlicoSoftware.com The Dewar Wildlife Trust, Inc. Home of Gorilla Haven: http://www.gorilla-haven.org . . . . . . -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/tech/support/forums/
