User Panel question

J.Luszczek

I'm building a compact UI for a customer. It will run on a small Fujitsu Lifebook in 600x800 resolution.
I have everything confined within the tablet's limited screen area. Bitmaps, faders, buttons. Nothing is running past the 600x800 guide lines. Yet, when I go in operate mode I get scroll bars. It's very frustrating.
I already shortened my faders- because the area a fader object occupies is much larger than the actual fader- (why is there extra 4 grid marks= 20 pixels above and below a fader?) .
What can I do to get rid of the scroll bars? I can't spare pixels for a \"buffer zone\" It's already tight, plus I spent a lot of time laying out 13 different pages so that they all look consistent.
Any suggestions?

Dan Lynch

In design mode, with that control panel active, hit CTRL-A. That's the Windows command to highlight everything in the active window. Once everything is highlighted, you'll be able to see what's hanging outside the screen borders and shrink it.

Graphic faders are likely to be the culprits. They resize themselves in really weird ways depending on the size of the graphic used for the trolley. I've never quite figured out exactly what they're doing, but it appears to have something to do with leaving enough room at the top/bottom for the graphic to stay inside the bounding box. When creating a small control panel, I usually just don't use the silly things. Vector faders work just fine for me and I like the way they look.

WARNING: There's a glitch in the Serial Toolbar which can make it freak out at low resolutions. If the screen is reduced in size far enough, the serial toolbar no longer has enough screen real estate to update and London Architect will crash every time you adjust the value of a control. The simplest solution is to just turn off the serial toolbar. You're not likely to need it on a small screen anyway. That'll be fixed in an future release but does still happen with 2.06r4.

For anybody who doesn't know about the \"screen guidelines\" Jan's talking about, click on TOOLS / FILE PREFERENCES and hit the SCREEN GUIDELINES tab. It allows you to place guidelines on your control panels which only appear while in design mode. They were originally conceived to show you the outline of the screen when editing on a computer that didn't match the resolution of the target computer. I use them for lots of other stuff. You can put guidelines anywhere on the screen, so you can use them to subdivide your screen visually. It makes it a lot quicker when putting panels together.

Dan

J.Luszczek

The fader slot graph is at fault. It is a vector image that scales with its background area. So, stretching a fader to be long for use with a touch screen also scales the background making it awkward to place within confined area.
Assigning a fixed size bitmap to the fader slot makes it easier to fit on a screen, but kills the ability to re-size it.

Dan Lynch

If you place four graphic faders together and put three different sized trolleys on three of them such as:
Fader V L Red
Fader V M Red
Fader V S Red
you'll see that the outer bounding box of the faders all stays the same size, but the slots shrink to make room for the various sizes of trolley. What's happening is that the slot is being made smaller so that the entire trolley will fit inside the bounding box. Unfortunately, the slot shrinks too much in every case and bigger trolleys make the problem worse.

Vector faders don't have that problem which is just one of the reasons why I like them so much.

Dan