Ryan Dary wrote:
I have heard this a few times now. With all due respect to the author
of Formatted Text Control, the concept of editable text is probably
one
of the oldest technologies in computing. Why would we encourage RB to
incorporate the newest iteration of the same thing? Why not simply
encourage RB to actually wrap up the most high-performance native
solution for each target platform?
Honestly, I think we should be sickened by REAL Software's lack of
keeping up with the movement of technologies. Our REALbasic apps are
once again easily recognizable among applications as they were back
before the inclusion of the Appearance Manager and the Control
Manager.
Ryan, I think you underestimate how difficult a task it is to
create an editor. If it were easy, there would be a dozen editors
out there right now. What usually happens is sincere people see
the current state of things and go out and try to do it
themselves. In a short while they give up because they didn't
realize how much work it would be in terms of quantity and
difficulty. In my experience, there are very few developers that
could handle such a task. I have had people write me and tell of
such experiences of trying to create an editor.
There is some basic confusion going on in this thread. Let me try
to clear it up for everybody. There are two types of editors out
there.
The first is the EditField variety which is bound by the actual
dimension of the control. Think of this like TextWrangler on the
Mac. It processes simple text layouts. It is not a word processor
layout. RS's EditField and WordGuise plugins falls in this camp.
The second is like my Formatted Text Control and it implements a
word processor layout. It is similar to Apple's Pages word
processor and it's layout is more sophisticated. The Formatted
Text Control is not an EditField replacement and never was
intended to be. Currently the Formatted Text Control has no
competition.
If you need to do word processor layout for reports or word
processing, using a plain old EditField simply looks stupid.
Likewise, using the Formatted Text Control for basic text layout
would be over kill. Use the right tool for the right job.
RS's EditField has some basic design flaws. It uses the built in
control on each platform and this is a choice that RS has made.
Because they have done this they have exposed the internals of
each platform's behavior to us the developer. This means that
things DO NOT behave the same on each platform and so it is
impossible create code that works the same way for all platforms.
You will have to #ifdef the code and insert special case handling
and this is especially true when handling styled text. I really
feel Ian's pain in dealing with the EditField on that level
because I have been there and done that. Note, this pain was part
of the inspiration for doing the Formatted Text Control since I
needed an editor that would be HASSLE FREE when dealing with cross
platform issues.
One day when time permits, I will create a straight EditField
replacement that behaves the same on all platforms similar to
the Formatted Text Control (and handles custom embedded objects).
RS's current EditField is doomed to stay the way it is, because RS
likes it that way and creating a replacement EditField would cost
them to much money. They are welcome to prove me wrong, but in my
estimation there is to much on their plate at the moment.
_______________________________________________
Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode:
<http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/>
Search the archives of this list here:
<http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
