IDE Suggestions

Organizing tasks to work on, New Features Ideas, Building LCS & LCB Libraries & Widgets, Redecorating and Modifying the IDE, Hacking / Editing Tools, Compiling the Engine from Source, etc.
xAction
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Re: IDE Suggestions

Post by xAction »

You could design fullscreen projects in a single window, if you could just scale things down during development to do it.
Which is a HUGE disadvantage of Livecode, since it's not in an OpenGL context or based on vectors like Illustrator files, or even held in bitmap layers like a Photoshop file...your whole UI layout can't just be virtually scaled up and down, cant' even be scrolled without complicating your whole project by shoving it all in group.

Every movie made in the last 20 yearsis is a full screen project and every video editor they were made in is a single window UI....well maybe a while back Premier was a hot mess of windows. I think Final Cut Pro was snappable pallettes? It's been a long time. I seem to recall they had a dreamy UI scripting language.

Every video game is a fullscreen project and the top three game engines are single UI apps...with exceptions, sometimes you have a popup window of some kind for set it and forget it stuff. Like if you are going to generate a monster procedural city you'll do that once and since there's a whole program's worth of controls then it pops a window up, you apply, close and don't see it again. Or you're going to load a few gigs of project extensions, you do that once in a window of it's own.

Looks like they were trying to make a game engine type IDE
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: IDE Suggestions

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

xAction wrote: Fri Nov 19, 2021 5:35 pm You could design fullscreen projects in a single window, if you could just scale things down during development to do it.
Which is a HUGE disadvantage of Livecode, since it's not in an OpenGL context or based on vectors like Illustrator files, or even held in bitmap layers like a Photoshop file...your whole UI layout can't just be virtually scaled up and down, cant' even be scrolled without complicating your whole project by shoving it all in group.
Yes it can

Code: Select all

-- pass true / false to toggle
on goFullScreen tEnable
  if tEnable then
    -- set the fullscreenmode of stack to {empty|"exactFit"|"letterbox"|"noBorder"|"noScale"|"showAll"}
    set the fullScreenMode of me to "exactFit" 
  end if
  set the fullScreen of me to tEnable
end goFullScreen
Also stacks have a scaleFactor property these days, so you can scale individual by stack. I've used that for palettes.

A stack is really just a operating system UI Kit generated window, on macOS this is an NSWinow object (and I can take control of it and make it do system level things) for example. A card is really a view object, collection of controls, graphics, etc. and is meant to be rendered in the stack's window. This is the equivalent of a web browser's window context. In xtalk Card's are basically the equivalent of web pages in the browser window. With some abstraction I think it could be made so that it doesn't matter if you're designed it all in a single window frame UI, a running it inside a browser using some sort of proxy-window objects or running on Desktop Linux with stacks running in actual windows.

I want to make the entire IDE much more customized, and customizable. That has also tied in with my thinking about a markup language for generating UI from a markup. The IDE already synthesizes a few windows from scripts, the tools palette (revTools.livecodescript) is an example. I want to create somewhat of an abstraction layer for the IDE... dissect it, document it, and abstract it enabling rebuilding the entire IDE UI on the fly from some markup file (with all of it's SVG path data or images embedded into itself). Then we can have a fullscreen UI "IDE desktop" or a windowed one, toggle between them, add user definable workspaces or whatever else too.
xAction
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Re: IDE Suggestions

Post by xAction »

fullScreenMode is some scary scaling.
scaleFactor is pretty cool though.
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OpenXTalkPaul
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Re: IDE Suggestions

Post by OpenXTalkPaul »

xAction wrote: Mon Nov 22, 2021 6:19 pm fullScreenMode is some scary scaling.
scaleFactor is pretty cool though.
Screen Shot 2021-11-22 at 12.57.13 PM.png
Screen Shot 2021-11-22 at 12.57.13 PM.png (777.85 KiB) Viewed 8001 times
micmac
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Re: IDE Suggestions

Post by micmac »

It works pretty well as it is.

There is plenty of other things to spend development time on.

Mic
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