[Lazarus] fpGUI

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On Sun, 2011-01-16 at 16:55 +0100, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> Layoutmanagers can suddenly react badly to new screen resolutions etc.

Not if you implement a descent layout manager. The one I'm working on is
a port of the MiG Layout Manager for Java. It was designed from the
start to be a all-purpose layout manager - meaning there is no need to
embed for example a horizontal layout inside a vertical layout inside a
grid layout etc.. MiG layout is intelligent enough to cope with complex
UI's[1]. It was also designed from the start to work with different dpi
resolutions and various units values for describing the UI (eg: pixels,
mm, meters, cm, inches, etc).

For more on MiG Layout, download their demo. It is rather impressive to
see, and quite easy to use. http://www.miglayout.com
With such a layout manager you don't even need a visual forms designer.

BTW:
Even Lazarus's form designer chokes on differing dpi values. Nowhere
does it store the DPI value the form was designed in, thus running such
an app on a differing DPI value system, and you have a complete UI mess
[last time I tested it]. At least Kylix 3 used to store the DPI setting
inside the .xfm file, so this helped a bit. Why doesn't Lazarus do that?



[1] They actually ran a competition or something to see if there was a
UI design MiG Layout couldn't handle. There was none.


-- 
Regards,
 - Graeme -

--------------------------------------------------------------
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/