[Lazarus] Lazarus Goal

[Hess, Philip J]

Brian,

There are two problems with this dialog, one small, one bigger. The small problem, easily corrected, is that it's too small and you didn't leave space for possible differences in fonts between platforms or translated text that takes up more horizontal space than English. Consideration for both of those things are part of normal dialog box design. The horizontal space take up by the button is completely wasted. Why not widen the button and put the label on it as a caption the way buttons normally do? Then set the dialog's font to Arial 10 or 11 and everything will be fine on both Windows and OS X. Well, almost...

The bigger problem is that this dialog doesn't make much sense. At first glance I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to do until I realized that the little squares were buttons. But without captions. And a Save button in the list there too? Very odd and dare I say non-standard. Maybe a toolbar at the top would do better. Then standardize the menus and use the toolbar for all manipulation rather than a combination of menu bar items and popup dialog.

Thanks.

-Phil

________________________________________
From: Brian Prentice [bprentice at webenet.net]
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 5:48 PM
To: Lazarus mailing list
Subject: Re: [Lazarus] Lazarus Goal

My point about showing the differences in the dialogs, one acceptable
and one clearly not acceptable, is that the solution seems to require
the construction of two dialogs one for OS X and one for WindowsXP.
Perhaps I'm wrong here but if I'm right this violates the Lazarus and
FPC goal of write once. I don't want to start a war here but as you
probably know Java has solved this problem nicely with layout
managers.  If layout managers were implemented in Lazarus the IDE
would also be simpler, an additional advantage.

Earlier in this thread it was stated that when designing an
application consideration should be given to the differences in the
underlying operating systems.  This might be true but if you do this
you severly weaken the stated goal which would then read something like:

'Lazarus and Free Pascal aim to be write once, compile anywhere for
those programs which only use the supported operating system features
that share a common design'.

Surely a better approach for Lazarus and FPC is to hide operating
system difference from users.

Brian

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