I don't know if this particular approach has been discussed before (I had a 
quick look through the archive but didn't spot anything like this) so 
here's my take on the sizer problem. At the moment, the position of 
components is defined in the resourceEditor as a co-ordinate relative to 
the top-left corner of the window. How about allowing the resourceEditor 
user to change the "point of reference" for a component to one of the other 
three corners? This would require a new property for components specifying 
which corner they are relative to, but could allow users to create basic 
resizable applications without having to dig in to the code.

As far as user interface goes I was thinking along the lines of the 
currently selected corner being highlighted, with the user clicking on 
different corners (or selecting them from a menu somewhere) to change the 
point of reference. To avoid confusion lines could be displayed on the 
canvas connecting the currently selected component to it's relative 
corners. I've created a couple of mockup screenshots to show this (they're 
hardly works of art but they should help demonstrate the idea):

http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/images/PythonCard/relative-top-left.gif
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/images/PythonCard/relative-bottom-left.gif

The other interesting aspect of resizable applications is that some 
components should change their dimensions as the page is resized. Looking 
at the widgets available for PythonCard it strikes me that only a few 
components would actually need to be resizable:

TextArea
StaticLine
StaticBox
Gauge (possibly)
Slider (possibly)

The simplest way of allowing a user to create a resizable component would 
seem to be to allow the user to specify the component's dimensions as a 
percentage rather than a fixed width in pixels (similar to how tables and 
divs can be sized in HTML). I don't know how feasible it is to combine 
fixed-relative-to-corner positioning with take-up-as-90%-of-available-space 
positioning but from a resourceEditor user perspective the two combined 
could create a very powerful but easy to use interface for creating 
resizable documents.

That said, one thing that would be nice in the absence of sizer support 
would be a "allow this application to be resized" option in the 
resourceEditor Background Info dialog. I'd love to turn off the user's 
ability to resize my application but I'm not confident enough to dive in 
and try to hard code this using native wxPython code.

Regards,

Simon


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