win fbe 1.7.6 button colours

[Paul Squires]

Lol 

Writing a visual designer is a hell of a lot of work. Even after having writing Firefly Visual Designer and knowing somewhat about what needs to be written, it still takes a lot of time. I've been slower writing this visual designer because I want to try to do it better (right) this time. I also want to try to build it so that changes and updates later will be easier rather than hard coding a lot of stuff.

Visual designer vs. hand coding and learning API, etc - all of us have long debated this question. In a perfect world, we would all know the api inside and out but everyone learns differently. I have seen that over the years of having Firefly Visual Designer, that customers get more excited about programming because they can get things up and running faster. The mundane creation and positioning of forms and controls and the easy reactions to dealing with events/messages is taken care of. This allows the more curious programmer to branch out and ask different questions such as dealing with owner draw, or databases, or networking - all because they don't have to deal with the foundation visual stuff. Being 100% dependant on a visual designer is obviously not good either and will be detrimental to your skills in the long run. If a visual designer can help inspire you to start to take baby steps to begin coding an application then I've done my job. That desire will morph into further curiosities that will eventually see you creating and sharing code. It all takes time and desire to learn. Some possess those skills better than others. Always ask questions and be willing to read and learn. Simply copying code will only take you so far. Programming is not a talent learned over night but I have met many programmers here and over on the PB forums who started off slow but with a bit of encouragement and pointing in the right direction, turned out to be amazingly self sufficient and ended up putting huge smiles on my face with the code and programs they shared. I'd name names, but I run the risk of forgetting people or inadvertently giving public attention when they'd prefer not to. I remember downloading the POFFS database that contained all of the PB forum posts. I literally spend days and days reading posts and seeing how topics were dealt with. I marvelled at the genius of programmers who just seemed to "know it". I absorbed concepts albeit at a slow pace but I never stopped learning or giving up. I learned algorithms that helped with my understanding of programming logic. I built Cheetah Database that taught me about file structures and indexing (B+Trees). I look back on my code from 10 years ago and laugh at its ugliness... but the code worked. Ten years from now I will look back on the WinFBE code and laugh at its ugliness. At least I hope that I will because that will mean that my programming skills have gotten better.

I was once a Visual Basic programmer who relied on a visual designer and the safe comfortable ecosystem of Visual Basic. Luckily for me though, my DOS programming background helped me keep my inquisitive nature and desire to learn so I didn't get held back by the finite limitations of Visual Basic. I am not a programmer by trade, but the skills I've learned from programming has helped me immensely in my day job and life in general.

Wait, what was the question? I think I went off topic a bit. 

[José Roca]

IMHO RAD tools should be used to save work with repetitive tasks, not a as a way to avoid learning. So many millions of VB6 users, and most of them know less about the inner workings of it than I, that never have used it! You can easily recognize an ex-VBer by the way they write keywords: they are the only ones that like to use mixed case

I once advised to some friends of mine to no hire anybody as a programmer if the candidate was unable to write a simple GUI by hand.

We were talking about HTML buttons. I know how to do it, but as it often happens with my code, nobody will use it if it is not conveniently buried and they have to code it by hand instead of filling properties. Anyway, I will made some tests just for fun, but it won't be practical for building a GUI with many buttons, because it will waste too many resources.

[Paul Squires]

You can easily recognize an ex-VBer by the way they write keywords: they are the only ones that like to use mixed case

I'm guilty of that

The next wave of programmers will be the JavaScript guys with their camal case.

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[raymw]

too much to think about... I remember when we never had vdu's, and programmers had to wear hobnailed boots and hard-wire their own programs, accuracy required longer slide rules, and bison roamed freely through the streets of London. And then Clive Sinclair invented the pocket calculator, electronic watch, and the BBC stupidly chose the wrong microprocessor for their computer. I read an article in Byte, by the guys who developed the bios for the ibm pc. They had the first colour monitor. iirc they said it was black, green and then blue and white smoke. It's been downhill ever since.The ibm pc put it back by about 4 years, but all the companies were waiting for it, because you never got sacked if you bought ibm (but later you did, if you bought their luggable!)
fwiw, I can usually recognise programs that have been written in Borland turbo pascal - they handle numeric data entry differently cf what I perceive as the Microsoft standard. - and as a user I find it a tad annoying.

I still rarely use tabs for text layout. When I used coding forms/punched cards, it was easier/usual to use spaces. Made a difference when the glass teletype came out, and you had to do your own typing, but by then I was out of full time programming, and had a couple of others to do the grafting. There's probably a book in there somewhere.