[Gambas-user] Developing KoGe Designer: here goes a bunch of bug & feature reports

[Benoit Minisini]

On Thursday 24 November 2005 04:10, Alberto Torres wrote:
> Hello,

Hello!

>
> KoGe designer is part of my project, it is a videogame designing tool
> for artists. Yesterday I released version 0.1.1 which is usable enough
> for trying out the implemented features. More info at
> http://koge.sf.net
>
> I wasn't sure where to mail this: to user or devel list. Gambas is a
> great developing tool, specially for GUIs, and I want to help to make
> gambas even better.
> While I was developing this, I found out (and sometimes suffered of)
> several bugs and design flaws which I'm going to list:
>
> * Shortcuts & keyboard events: I set several shorcuts for several menu
> items, some of them are single keys (i.e. no ctrl/alt/shift). Those
> single-key settings sometimes dissapears or doesn't work when
> reopening the project.

I couldn't reproduce this bug... Can you send me a project where single-key 
shortcuts disappear?

> I also wanted to allow the user to select several things while
> pressing ctrl key. I have no way of knowing the status of ctrl when
> user is clicking the drawingArea: keyboard events can't be read
> outside keydown/up events, 

The Mouse static class has the following properties: Alt, Control and Shift to 
know if one of this key was pressed during the mouse event.

> and keydown/up events of several widgets 
> including this drawingarea are *never* triggered.

This is a problem. Only widgets with focus get them. I will try to fix that.

> A workaround I built for both problems is putting a textbox behind
> something and always give it the focus. It catchs key events and sets
> a ctrl flag accordly. But now menu shortcuts don't work. What I did:
> textbox also manages menu shotcuts.
>
> * I don't know why the hell scrollbars in animator aren't set properly
> until you resize the window or move an object (see VSplit1_Resize()).
> Even when those scollbars are (manually) set up correctly, I don't
> know why sometimes editVBar is shorter than it should.

What are you talking about exactly? Which containers, with which controls 
inside?

>
> * XmlReader is not very developer-friendly, specially when you use it
> with nested objects that manages the input themselves. I have made a
> class called kgXmlReader, wrapping an interface that, in my opinion,
> xmlReader should have. Take a look at kgXmlReader class, xmlRead() of
> any class and frmActionEd.Load() to see how I nest the reading
> proccess.
>
> Also, neither XmlReader nor XmlDocument can't be used to parse XMPP
> streams (I tried to make a jabber client in gambas, and I ended
> parsing manually several things before feeding data to gb.xml).

That is Daniel's job :-)

>
> * Translate project dialog has a button labeled 'close'. It means that
> closing the window should have the same effect as clicking that
> button, but it doesn't. Closing the window discards changes without
> any warning!

Another bug...

>
> * When you save and there is no space left in hard disk, files are
> truncated without any warning. I have lost some data several times
> because of that.

Yet another one...

>
> * I can't invoke ListView items renaming, so the only way to rename
> something is the user clicking something when it's already selected.

Yes! I forgot the Rename method in the ListView item virtual class. I will add 
it.

>
> * I can't know where I'm dropping a drag into a ListView: .find always
> returns the selected item. Because of that I finally didn't
> implemented the copy-animation-by-dragging feature.

Strange... It shouldn't. Did you look at the TreeView example? The Find method 
of TreeView, ListView and ColumnView internally execute the same code.

>
> * I'd like to save the size of frmActionEd.HSplit1, or at least keep
> it always in the same position by default. I did a quick hack at
> HSplit1_Resize() that worked, but I don't know how to control the
> proportion between both panels.

Did you see the Layout property?

>
> * I still miss the selection clipboard in gambas editor (select=copy,
> middle-click=paste). I got used again to the so-known ctrl+x/c/v
> because of this. 

Sorry, I didn't implement it.

> Klipper helps as bridge between normal clipboard and 
> selection clipboard. As alternative, remapping those key bindings
> would be ok, specially when I tried to switch to dvorak.
>
> * I'd like to add things to the changelog while I'm working with a
> release instead of putting it all at the package wizard.

You can. ChangeLog is just a text file in the project.

>
> * Sometimes it's difficult to maintain and free circular references
> cleanly. I'll post about it tomorrow with some suggestions explaining
> how it could be easier.

It is just a matter of knowing what you do. It is difficult when you have to 
maintain parent/child relationship between objects.

>
> * Interpreter crashes when no $LANG is set. Oh, ok, that's fixed.
> There should be an easy way to test a project with another $LANG set.

You mean, when you run the project from the IDE?

>
> I forget some things, but it's very late. I'm going to sleep.

I'm waiting the following with impatience :-)

>
> Cheers, and good night
> --
> DiThi
> e-mail: kungfoobar at ...626...
> Jabber ID: dithi at ...646...
>

Regards,

-- 
Benoit Minisini