Hunting for bugs in OXT 0.98 and above

[richmond62]

Actually, odd as it may seem, rotating a circle and getting it to "break up" into a polygon would save you the bother of messing around with sines and cosines to generate an ellipticle path with points for a 'move to the points' sort of animation: so not completely daft.

Call that a bug if you like: I'd rather characterise that as an unintended gift.

[richmond62]

Hard to resist frankly:
-

SShot 2024-04-08 at 17.07.17.png (123.4 KiB) Viewed 282 times

[richmond62]

"By chance" I discovered that the menu item "Rotate" is greyed out with an oval graphic in LC 963.

Did you "potentialise" that?

[tperry2x]

Did you "potentialise" that?

I wasn't aware of that one. I wonder why that might be the case. It's not a decision I've made to prevent it from rotating or anything, so seems a bit strange.

[richmond62]

Well it is better WITH that possibility than WITHOUT it: so . . .

https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=39037

[tperry2x]

I'm going to try this in LCC 9.6.3. It might be something I've inherited from using Paul's revMenubar stack, as there seems to be additions to it that I'm not aware of. This could be one of them.

[tperry2x]

As promised, have just tried this in 9.6.3 and can confirm the rotate option isn't there:
(It was probably disabled for good reason).

Screenshot_2024-04-09_14-49-24.png (111.14 KiB) Viewed 257 times

Looking at the script for 9.6.3, if the selection is a graphic, you can see it intentionally sets "enableFlipandRotate" to false.

why.png (25.47 KiB) Viewed 255 times

You can see in OXT Lite (and I suspect in OXT 'heavy'), the rotate commands don't get disabled if the graphic is a "rectangle, roundrect, line, oval, regular, line, curve, polygon" - I didn't write that (as there's no comment there with my name against it), but it was changed at some point.

why2.png (170.09 KiB) Viewed 254 times

As I used the 'revMenuBar' back in v0.99 from OXT 'heavy', I think I inherited it from there. I'll go and check that out now...

edit: It's disabled in RC3 of OXT heavy:

in RC3 heavy.png (167.68 KiB) Viewed 251 times

So, now off to check this in RC4 of OXT 'heavy'...

[richmond62]

It has fairly put the cat amongst the pigeons on 'another forum.'
(I moderated your post slightly, as I have drawn people's attention to it on the 'other forum')

[tperry2x]

Aha, tracked down where that option must have come from.
It's in Paul's RC4 version, so I must have inherited this when I used his revMenubar.
But at least makes sense why it's there in OXT lite now (perfect sense, as I knew I'd not changed that - I'd have put inline comments in the script), I used that revMenubar back then as I was getting those weird crashes under MacOS X, but seems it brought this stuff across too.

in RC4 heavy.png (192.12 KiB) Viewed 243 times

[tperry2x]

Well it is better WITH that possibility than WITHOUT it: so . . .
https://forums.livecode.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=39037

I don't know - I'm not so sure it should be in there if it doesn't work properly.
I'm not sure if I should revert it to being disabled (like in LCC/RC3 heavy, and OXT lite versions before 0.99), or keep it enabled - even though it does weird things like converting shapes to points.

In my view, it's kind of corrupting the original object (as handy as it might seem to add those points in), if you don't want those points added - it's kind of better to not have it messing up the graphic (in my opinion).

On your last LC forum post, pop this link on it and it'll take anyone straight here:
https://www.openxtalk.org/forum/viewtop ... 7904#p7904

Oh, and hope your jaw feels better - I can relate to that. Dental work is no fun. I'd have had all my teeth pulled out in one go at a young age, on the NHS if I'd have had the option. I have one going sideways in my gum, which I didn't even know was there until an xRay - neither did the dentist. It'll require surgery rather than a straightforward dental procedure to remove, so it's still in there

[richmond62]

My jaw is just fine as ALL that has been happening is that my dentist has been working on a dead tooth as the channel where the nerve was before it died is infected: so no pain, just a bother. Will end up with a ceramic crown.

[richmond62]

I will NOT post the link to hear as 'someone' told me in no uncertain terms they would not tolerate that . . .
(I moderated your post slightly, as I don't mean to offend anyone who might read it).

[tperry2x]

I will NOT post the link to hear as 'someone' told me in no uncertain terms they would not tolerate that . . .

Well, I'd actually registered on there and posted (as much as I can) a pointer to here.
It was in the interests of helping them, as I can't post screenshots or anything either. I'll probably ruffle feathers, but it's not intended to. As I've said, my hope would be that we could occasionally help eachother out if the door is left ajar.

[richmond62]

Now the smoke has partly cleared.
(I moderated your post slightly, again, - because it could be taken the wrong way couldn't it).
My hope is there could be an amicable back-and-forth if it results in helping someone.

[tperry2x]

My post on the other forum seems to have been taken in the spirit in which it was intended, which is nice.
I feel a little better knowing that it wasn't punted off.
I hope my explanation as to what it is doing makes sense.

I'm assuming it's something to do with the way the LCC engine handles rotated graphics, by breaking them into points first, calculating where each point should be compared to it's non-rotated position, then rotating them all. But in doing so, it leaves them as points. I've been looking at the engine code recently and staring at the C++ function, that is indeed what it looks like it's doing.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

"By chance" I discovered that the menu item "Rotate" is greyed out with an oval graphic in LC 963.

I believe this not being enabled was one of several problems with revRotate stack (I just fixed another issue with that stack's loc on the screen being screwy on preOpenStack), also in the associated script libraries. I had done this some time ago. This is actually what lead to my interest in adding that mechanism for copying graphic objects as 'SVG path string' to that menu (and since then I've added a copy as SVG File to the pasteboard. IIRC, that also prompted me to write that VectorPathDrawingBoard widget, which also draws with lots of small straight lines but it would be super-cool to add Bézier curve point editing to that. Personally I'm just happy that I can at least get the shapes into SVG Data that I can import or copy/paste into a drawing app like Illustrator or InkScape or as a Path string to use with Widgets

The 'Reshape' menu item was also not working properly in LC CE 9.6.3. I mostly fixed that but graphics sometimes becomes stuck in point-edit mode until I remove the stack from memory and then reopen it.

All those graphic objects, wether it's an oval, round rect, irregular polygon, when you go into point-edit mode what you get is the the same as the result of ' get the effective points of grc "graphicName" '. which means its made up of lots of small straight lines (it looks like a tracing of a bitmap image).

There are no nice efficient bezier curves lines to convert these to that is built-in, BUT you COULD convert the properties of these objects to curved paths to use in Extension Builder / SVG Icons / SVG Data to Pasteboard.
I meant to try to add that sort of refinement to the handler that copies graphic object(s) as SVG data, but have yet to get to it.

[richmond62]

Now: here's a thought (which, almost inevitably comes in several chunks):

As a consequence of my having 'discovered' a very basic difference between LC 963 (and, one assumes "9.7") in regard to rotating Oval graphics:

1. How many other, potentially useful, capabilities are disabled/buried in the inherited IDE?

2. How many of those have been recently disabled/buried?

2.1. What might be the reason for them being disabled/buried?

3. Or were they present in MetaCard and disabled/buried when the Runtime Revolution front-end was attached to the MetaCard engine, and then carried over to when RunRev/LC became its own thing?

Certainly if there are some more disabled/buried capabilities that are potentially useful it is worth considering whether they should be enabled/excavated in OXT.

[richmond62]

I have just rotated a 4-sided regular polygon by 90 degrees and, also got its points . . .

This is quite useful in a way that

Code: Select all

the effective points

is not insofar as one can modify those points through scripting, and even add points if one so wishes.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Certainly if there are some more disabled/buried capabilities that are potentially useful it is worth considering whether they should be enabled/excavated in OXT.

I think that various things have gotten broken over the years and then someone decided it wasn't worth fixing since hardly anyone actually uses these features ( maybe that's because they stopped working, chicken?/egg?), or they were just too low-priority to ever be gotten to. Like the pixel drawing tool not saving pixel drawings... most people don't use the IDE for Pixel drawing when there's Gimp and Photoshop and other such apps. Answer Effect and Record are two more examples, they relied on Quicktime, and then were just never replaced (at least not in the FOSS version) with a differnt implementation that uses a newer API (on MacOS only AVMedia APIs were the replacement for Quicktime, but not cross platform like QuickTime was).

[micmac]

We shall remember that the tools are not so much there for us to make fx a drawing from time to time, as it is tools we provide for others to use.

The whole structure of openXtalk with its card based approach lend it very much in the direction of apps like:

https://www.goodnotes.com (on all platforms and all devices)

https://notability.com (Mac only but all devices)

Upcomming: https://rnote.flxzt.net (all platforms and all devices)

They are very much "paint" driven note takers.

So it depend in what direction you look and what your interest are.

I have a drawing tablet connected to my Mac.

Mic