At 12:44 30/04/02 +0100, Simon Willison wrote:
> 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.

I've thought about this a bit more and percentages may not be the best way 
to do this. In most situations I (as an end user) would rather just select 
a component and instruct it to expand either vertically, horizontally or 
both to fill any available space. Combine that with 
positioning-relative-to-corners and simple applications (such as my 
ScratchPad program) would have all of the basic sizer functionality needed 
to handle resizing.

Another thought: Rather than specify that a textarea should expand to fit 
horizontally and take up as much horizontal space as possible for the sake 
of aesthetics it would be preferable to be able to specify a "margin" on 
the side that is being expanded. The definition of such a component might 
look a little like this:

{'type':'TextArea',
     'name':'ScratchPadText',
     'position':(0, 30),
     'relative': 'top-left',
     'size':('*', '*'),
     'font':{'faceName': 'Courier New', 'family': 'monospace', 'size': 8},
     'rightMargin': 8
     'bottomMargin': 8
     },

The *s in the size tuple mean "expand horizontal" and "expand vertical". 
The right margin and bottom margin are explicitly defined - this is the 
space in pixels that should be left between that side of the component and 
the border of the application (or the start of the next component anchored 
on that side).

Final thought: It would be useful if GUI designers could specify a 
"smallest possible" size, after which the application can not be resized 
any smaller (a similar effect can be seen in the Samples Launcher which can 
not be shrunk below a certain size). This will prevent problems with users 
resizing the application to the point where the position rules defined for 
the widgets (with respect to corners of the application) cause them to 
overlap each other.

I'm currently reading up on wxPython with the intent of hacking around with 
the PythonCard prototype a bit at some point, but ion the meantime (if no 
one minds) I'll keep throwing ideas at this list and see if any of them 
stick ;)

Regards,

Simon


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