Users complain boring user interface of my apps

[Kukulkan]

Hi Tenaja,

your answer is not helpful and ignores all the efforts that people like I spent to PB. I'm using PB since 2005 and I built a whole companies products on PB. And I wrote more than 1200 posts in this forum and worked around many PB limitations in these years. And finally, I must say that many requests by many users have been simply ignored over the last years. You can see my profile and read all the posts. You will see that I contributed many many bug reports and also made a lot of feature requests and also lined out why they are important to people like me. And, sadly, many of them have been ignored. And the only reason I and a few others still read and follow this forum and PB development is because we love or at least loved this language and were still willing to contribute. A few years ago, I and my company even paid Fred for the integration of a few features, used by the community now.

If you read this thread carefully, you will also see that I and others started to make a sciter wrapper and found PB limitations that stopped us from doing so. And then Fred promised to have a look. And again we were ignored and/or forgotten.

Sorry, but my issues are not just mimimi. It is the desperate attempt to point Fred to things missing. Missing in a programming language that is used to build many great products still in use by my customers. I would love to stay with PB, but I find myself forced to move on. You can find a few reasons in this thread and many others.

You two sound like ungrateful snivelers, kulkulkan

And thank you for the mean insult. That was not nice from you. Maybe you should re-think what you're telling to a PB veteran who would never insult anyone in a forum and had no harsh words to anyone.

[Bitblazer]

You two sound like ungrateful snivelers, kulkulkan and bitblazer, right about now.

I guess you misunderstood what i wrote I used two different working solutions back then and mentioned them here in this tread. You can easily create great skinned apps with purebasic with the skincrafter dll solution. But skinning my apps created other problems so i stopped doing that.

[skywalk]

What is wrong with roll your own canvasgadget elements?
There are many fine contributions here.

[Tenaja]

What is wrong with roll your own canvasgadget elements?
There are many fine contributions here.

I agree, there are a great number of excellent gadgets on here. I do not have time right now, but it would be great if someone collected them into a repository and they were standardized. (I would never expect Fred to have time, though.) On the other hand, with a C back end, you could probably just adopt another foss gui library that's already good to go.

And my apologies to Kukulkan and bitblazer, my attitude was poor when I wrote that last post and I should have been more positive. I come here because I like the people here, including you two, and should not have let my bad day be reflected in my post.

[Bitblazer]

What is wrong with roll your own canvasgadget elements?

For me it is simply a question of lifetime. I am currently extending one of Thorsten's canvas based gadgets that is used heavily in my next project, but it means i have worked on Thorstens canvas based listgadget recently, instead of my own project.

The time it takes, is the problem for me. I know commercial widget / gadget libraries that i could use instead, but they are surprisingly expensive.

@Tenaja - np we all have these days

[mk-soft]

Getting a good free grid control is not easy either. At that time I had used a DLL 32 bit grid control (all original created with API). Unfortunately, there is no 64 bit and the sources code online also no longer.

With the CanvasGadget have built some good controls. But then built more and more functions purely that you do not really need and thus the control is cluttered and overloaded.

Sometimes less is more

[Bitblazer]

Getting a good free grid control is not easy either. At that time I had used a DLL 32 bit grid control (all original created with API). Unfortunately, there is no 64 bit and the sources code online also no longer.

With the CanvasGadget have built some good controls. But then built more and more functions purely that you do not really need and thus the control is cluttered and overloaded.

Sometimes less is more

I am working with Thorsten's ListEx module which can be used as grid control. Once i have a decent new version, i will post the updated version as source. The license is MIT / tea and pizza ware

It works fine in 64bit and thats where i use and compile it. My real problem is the current complete lack of documentation

[Kukulkan]

Thanks Tenaja for your apology. No hard feelings, so let us look forward.

BTW, this thread starts to repeat the arguments and answers. I already mentioned on the first page of this thread, that I already created my own gadgets and made them available for everyone. And there I also lined out why that is not working good for me. I and others also made a few feature requests regarding XMLDialog (also regarding the mentioned issue) but they were ignored, too.

I then tried to use the webgadget (it was hard because it works very different on the three platforms and I needed to write a lot of workarounds to make it act identical on them), but sadly it stopped working on Linux because it relies on a webgadget control that is no longer shipped from Ubuntu 18.04 (here, here and others who asked). This forced me to convert everything to QT backend. And then I found that the QT backend was terrible done and filed a huge bunch of bugs. I took me a few months to deliver a version to my customers that worked on Ubuntu 18.04. And QT support is still having issues...

Also, relying on any closed source third party component is not a good option for me. I always try to prevent that. Like mk-soft, I had bad experience and also some bad surprises. But I also have to rely on sciter for the moment, because I have not found better options yet. I dont like the dependency, though.

IMHO, I think a Desktop centric programming language should offer modern GUI elements as a basic set of features (whatever is currently modern, best look at google, apple and microsoft to get an idea). This includes a usable grid and tree gadget and also HiDPI on all platforms (not only Windows). And if that is not in focus, it should at least offer easy integration of some good tools like sciter, electron, NW.js, wxWidgets etc...

Getting a good free grid control is not easy either.

You can try my treeview control. It can be used as a grid, too or use it as an idea or basis for something new.

[captain_skank]

Whilst I agree on the canvasgadget suggetions I have to say the whole DPI issue causes me to want to avoid it.

Also whilst I can ( and have ) create custom gadgets to generate a look and feel your still stuck with the window, unless you either skin it or again use a background canvasgadget or image - but then we get into other issues like moving, resizing the window and DPI again.

With grids i now use a webgadget and hook the events, it means i don't have to worry about DPI - formatting is easy and I don't have reams of code. The downside is the webgadget is so old a lot of fancy formatting with javascript etc is painfull if not impossible.

I've got to the point where i'm considering migrating my ERP application from PB to something else ( probably PHP+MariaDB and some fancy javascriptUI library )

[Caronte3D]

I think this is something to be seriously considered by the Fantaisie Ssoftware team, because when something is so important that users decide to switch to another language, we are not talking about something trivial.

[tored]

I found this topic very interesting. I picked up PureBasic to be able to write cross platform desktop application without too much hassle and PureBasic actually does for the most part and I don't mind the classic look.

However there is a market out there with users demanding a more modern look, but there are also technical aspects like DPI scaling (canvas) and hardware acceleration.

So what I have done the past day is to continue on a Sciter integration, it seems like the consensus on the forum that Sciter would be the best option, I used parts of what some else posted on this forum a while back, but it seems like the Sciter API is somewhat of a moving target, thus I didn't work.

It has been a bit of headscratcher to get it working because there is a bit of lack of documentation and I'm not PureBasic nor a C/C++ guru either. But I just got something working and I even have the Sciter inspector working.

There is a lot of things left to do on the code, it is a mess because there is a lot of just make it work kind of style, but I'm hoping to post a draft of it within a week.

Here is a screenshot of an example app taken from the sciter sdk together with the inspector



Sciter integration reference
https://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtopic.php?t=65884

[mk-soft]

Getting a good free grid control is not easy either. At that time I had used a DLL 32 bit grid control (all original created with API). Unfortunately, there is no 64 bit and the sources code online also no longer.

With the CanvasGadget have built some good controls. But then built more and more functions purely that you do not really need and thus the control is cluttered and overloaded.

Sometimes less is more

I am working with Thorsten's ListEx module which can be used as grid control. Once i have a decent new version, i will post the updated version as source. The license is MIT / tea and pizza ware

It works fine in 64bit and thats where i use and compile it. My real problem is the current complete lack of documentation

I still use the original "MyGrid" from "said". There is also a CHM in it, but it no longer opens with Windows 10.
Today I did another update of MyGrid to improve the ComboBox.

Link: Canvas based grid gadget

[Bitblazer]

Thanks for the link. I still like to use and create chm files and the excellent Sumatra PDF reader opens them fine

[BarryG]

I still use the original "MyGrid" from "said". There is also a CHM in it, but it no longer opens with Windows 10.

It opens normally here on Win 10 Pro. Something is up with your PC.

[mk-soft]

I still use the original "MyGrid" from "said". There is also a CHM in it, but it no longer opens with Windows 10.

It opens normally here on Win 10 Pro. Something is up with your PC.

You must have adjusted the registry at some point so that external CHMs are displayed again.