Short 15 second visual designer video clip

[Paul Squires]

Just a short clip that shows the design form being resized. It is nice to now have the opportunity to re-code a visual designer so many years after FireFly was written. Code is a lot cleaner and easier to use and understand now. Of note is that now the grab handles are no longer windows. They are dynamically calculated and drawn onto the screen during the WM_PAINT message handler. This will eventually eliminate the issue whereby if you have many, many, controls on screen and attempt to move a selected group of them that the screen would lag having to refresh not only the controls themselves but also all of the grab handle windows.

https://youtu.be/xSPo3dASwDU

[José Roca]

With the Web Browser class it will be very easy to display videos in the editor.

[Paul Squires]

I certainly haven't forgotten the use for an embedded web browser
I have long planned of creating a series of tutorial videos that explain how to use the editor and now eventually the visual designer. I would have a separate Help Centre that contains the whole list of tutorials and they can be viewed directly from within the ditor via your web browser code. That would be awesome.

[Petrus Vorster]

You should add a LIKE button on that clip.

Great stuff, can't wait!!!!

[flyfree13]

I am 120 days late.

I am glad to have found this forum. I don't know whether there is a place I can learn to use your firefly visual designer?

Thank you.

[Paul Squires]

The FireFly Designer is being phased out due to many of its limitations on newer versions of Windows and display devices. WinFBE is the replacement. The editor portion of WinFBE is pretty feature complete whereas the visual designer element of WinFBE is still a work in progress.

[John Boyd]

The FireFly Designer is being phased out due to many of its limitations on newer versions of Windows and display devices.

Hi Paul, many thanks for all your work and contributions. Firefly has been a wonderful time saver for me.

Currently, I have a few different Firefly + PBWin applications running with clients. Most of these clients are running Win7 64bit - until Win10 is finally out of beta ;-)

You mentioned limitations in FF with new Windows and displays...
Are there any particular showstoppers that I should be concerned about?

[Paul Squires]

Here are a few just off the top of my head:

- FireFly produces only 32-bit programs.
- FireFly is ANSI only. Without native unicode support it is not suitable for international use and languages.
- FireFly itself (and its generated programs) look terrible on high dpi displays. Basically, try setting your dpi to > 96 dpi and you will see the problems with things not aligning and images not scaling.
- FireFly is written using PowerBasic. A dead language.

[John Boyd]

Here are a few just off the top of my head:

Thanks Paul. Nothing there that will affect my clients at this stage.