Navigator 6.5 alpha 2 is out -- recent targets

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geoffcanyon
Posts: 53
Joined: Thu Aug 15, 2013 9:25 am

Navigator 6.5 alpha 2 is out -- recent targets

Post by geoffcanyon » Thu Oct 04, 2018 2:08 am

As usual, you can get Navigator here. Or grab it from GitHub.

This is a major update to how Navigator handles what container to target. It also changes how Navigator handles list display, and several other things. Notes below.

=== NEW FEATURES ===

RECENT TARGETS
The Card menu now stores the last 7 containers you've displayed in Navigator. So for me, this makes for super-fast switching between Navigator itself and test stacks I'm experimenting with. Let me know what you think about how many items to display here.

Underlying the above (and the card menu fix below), the method for determining what to display has changed significantly (but not completely, still a work in progress). This means that a few of the more obscure features of Navigator have gone away as of this update. Specifically, it used to be possible to browse "card <name>" or "card id <value>" of the topstack -- meaning that if you switched between stacks that happened to have cards with identical names/ids, Navigator would happily switch with you. Now, when displaying a specific card or group, the stack reference is part of that identification, so switching to a different stack in LiveCode doesn't change anything. Meaning: the only display in Navigator that follows what you do in LiveCode is the "This Card" of "The topStack" display.

CARD/BACKGROUND MENU SMARTER
The Card menu and Background menu are now duplicate-name-safe. It's a small thing, but it used to be the case that the menus browsed based on the literal text in the menu, so if you had two cards with identical names, there was no way to browse the second card using the menu. (you could still do it by displaying the card list and then right-clicking either card in the list and selecting Browse Controls on the popup) The menu items will still have identical names, but selecting the second (or third...) item will correctly browse that card or group.

SAVE ALL PROGRESS DISPLAY
The "Save All" command for a stack, which was terribly broken by any missing stack references until the last version, now quickly displays all the files it's saving in Navigator's title bar, and then for 1 second it says how many files it saved, before reverting to the normal Navigator title display.

CHANGED NAVIGATOR'S LIST FIELD TO FIXEDLINEHEIGHT
This was a long-standing source of frustration: the showLines property, combined with fixedLineHeight, results in the text being displayed high in the lines (or the lines being displayed low, take your pick). This has been the case since as long as I can remember. Hence Navigator has struggled along with fixedLineHeight set to false for years (even though all the lines are the same height), and this caused all sorts of issues. This time around I changed that. This might (it doesn't for me, but fonts are weird) cause issues with text display in Navigator's list. If it does, let me know. The control for folding groups also changed, so if you see any anomalies there definitely let me know.

FIXED NAVIGATOR COMMAND SAVING
(and file IO in general). It is now possible to save Commands, and then use them later. One command that I use *all the time* when working on drag and drop, or in general:

if tIndex = 1 then
ask "Base Name:"
if the result is not empty then exit to top
put it into tName
end if
set the name of tID to tName && tIndex

This lets you specify a text component, and then names all the selected controls with an index -- give it "test" and the controls will be named test 1, test 2, test 3, etc.

NEW NAVIGATOR DOCUMENTATION
I've started new Navigator documentation at https://gcanyon.wixsite.com/navigator It's not complete by any stretch, but what it does document is up to date. The original documentation is still available at https://gcanyon.wordpress.com/navigator-documentation/

FONT POPUP IN THE PROPERTY EDITOR
What it says on the tin -- like other enumerated properties, if you click on the font name in the textFont property in Navigator's Property Editor, instead of editing the text, a menu will pop up with all available fontNames.

RENAMING CONTROLS IN THE PROPERTY EDITOR FIXED
Because of the name/short name weirdness, it used to be that if you edited the name of button "bob" you would literally get -- button "bob" -- to edit, and if you didn't change it to just -- bob -- the name would be set accordingly. This is, as far as I know, the only instance where you can:

set the name of button "bob" to the name of button "bob"

And change the value. And for the record, no, you can't set the short name of anything. So I finally broke down and special-cased the name, so despite being called name, it displays the short name, and then sets the name to whatever you enter.

A BUNCH OF SMALL BUG FIXES THAT I OUGHT TO DOCUMENT BETTER...
Yeah, sorry I don't have a list.

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