"Behave like a background" doesn't work

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dunbarx
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Re: "Behave like a background" doesn't work

Post by dunbarx » Thu May 13, 2021 10:48 pm

What Richard says.

I had mentioned that if you had a stack of cards with several bg groups here and there, and made a new card from wherever, you likely would not want all those groups, will he nil he, to appear on the new card.

The "opposite" is true. You have complete control over which groups appear where, when and how. But you have to make that happen under script control. LC is not "automated" that way. If it was, it would be a far poorer and simple minded development tool.

The price is that into order to have it your way, you have to make it happen. The benefit is that you get it your way, because you made it happen.

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Re: "Behave like a background" doesn't work

Post by stam » Thu May 13, 2021 10:55 pm

FourthWorld wrote:
Thu May 13, 2021 9:47 pm
Need a shortcut for laying out multiple resuscitation protocol diagrams which reflect the different terminologies and practices between US and UK medical standards? I wrote that years ago. Good luck finding that feature in PowerPoint. :)
Hi Richard - as usual i think i've been misunderstood, maybe i should be clearer. I am a staunch fan of LC, but that's not to say there isn't room for improvement in the IDE. You've been living and breathing LC for many years and no doubt there is nothing you can't do with it. But for someone who's been using it for weeks or months doing simpler things can be rather apocryphal.

Might be easier if i just bullet-point my, erm, points:
  • i am not suggesting a presentation app is remotely as useful as LC
  • i am not comparing LC to a presentation app or even commenting on it's ability as a multimedia authoring environment
  • i am suggesting that the same mechanism used to choose layouts in presentation apps (and modifying backgrounds) would be a nice touch for newcomers and help them.
  • i am suggesting this would be a useful feature for intermediate/advanced users as well. Why you ask? because the IDE could be set up showing something like this on creation of new stack:
    xcode.jpg
    Or you could have a mechanism for creating such templates that can be shared etc. These would be bare-bone skeletons of common design patterns - getting this right would be a massive time saver...
Again don't get me wrong - i enjoy LC am very productive with this. But that's not to say thing's can't be improved on.
But i realise this is a largely intellectual exercise and will likely never translate into change...

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Re: "Behave like a background" doesn't work

Post by FourthWorld » Fri May 14, 2021 12:42 am

Sounds like we're on the same page. Templates are a very different topic from background management, but a good one, perhaps worth discussing. I like that screen-shot - did you make that?

The core team are excellent engineers, and can make competent UIs. But AFAIK no one on the team specializes in UX or CX, and sometimes it shows. The tremendous effort put into a Widget subsystem is an environment without templates is a good example, esp. since template stacks are much easier to make.

In fact, for both of those reasons it might be ideal to see a templating subsystem as a community collaboration. That would allow fresh design thinking to guide it, and only a community is big and diverse enough to produce enough templates to make it worth doing.
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Re: "Behave like a background" doesn't work

Post by kdjanz » Fri May 14, 2021 1:58 am

Hi Richard

That is a screen shot of the current, or at least recent, Xcode. 8-) You obviously don't go there much.

Kelly

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Re: "Behave like a background" doesn't work

Post by FourthWorld » Fri May 14, 2021 7:39 am

kdjanz wrote:
Fri May 14, 2021 1:58 am
Hi Richard

That is a screen shot of the current, or at least recent, Xcode. 8-) You obviously don't go there much.
True, my clients won't let me spend much time on single-platform tools these days. Most of my time is in JavaScript, LiveCode, and bash.
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