Usually I am a web developer so this is probably a very novice question. I recently made an app in VB2008, but I developed it in a huge reso (1920x1200). The person that will be using it still uses 800x600 reso. Is there any simple way I can resize the entire interface to fit any resolution? I didn't really think about it at all while I was making the program.
I'm not sure if there's any simple way of changing your application. If you were writing an application from scratch I'd suggest looking at the Dock, Anchor, MinSize and MaxSize properties of the controls, all of which are quite useful to make them resize according to the total size of the application. Could be a bit annoying if you have to go in and change them all manually now though.
There's also the TableLayoutPanel control, you can read about it here.
Related
This may be fairly obvious as I cant find it on Google but I have a windows form of a given height and width in the VS Designer and it looks perfect.
The object inspector and the ViewDesigner.VB all match up.
But when it gets compiled the window is noticeably bigger and brings with it a whole heap of wasted space around the edges. This is more than just ClientSize etc. This is a good inch or two.
Any idea whats causing it? It's not a resolution issue as this happens on the same machine.
For future reference this was nothing I was doing, it was coded into the larger application to retain window states.
So it simply re-sized to either what it was or what it thought it should be.
Thanks for the help and suggestions either way.
Being a somewhat proficient iOS developer, I have just started working on a desktop OSX project in Cocoa and I'm running into issues that I just can't grasp. So this question is for the OSX developers out there.
I don't like the Interface Builder much, so I tend to write my views in code. The most prominent method I write my view layout code in is a view controller's loadView method, and at least on iOS I use autoresizingMasks for everything. Try out the view small, large, rotated landscape and portrait and if all is dandy, I continue with the next item on my list. Now on the desktop, the autoresizingMask works (or just looks) a little bit different. First of all the properties have different names, but their behavior also seems weird or unexpected.
When I ran into the issue below, I thought it must be my code was wrong, so after trying out long enough I re-created it with Interface Builder just for confirmation's sake, and guess what: I got the exact same result. Take a view with four vertically stacked subviews. Set the middle two to have flexible heights, the outer ones to be fixed. When you run it, size it down and back up again, I get two completely different layouts before and after the resize. See image:
Now I can follow why this happens from a mathematical standpoint between run loops, but from the point of an 'autosizing' or 'autoresizing' feature, this makes absolutely no sense.
Before I try to write the mother-of-all-resizing-topics here, might I ask you these questions? Feel free to elaborate some more on the resizing topic if you feel it adds to the post.
Am I a fool for not wanting to use the Interface Builder on desktop projects?
Should I depend on the autoresizingMask less than I would on iOS projects?
What are decent alternatives to making sure your layout lives up to standards without Interface Builder?
Cheers!
Yes, in my opinion. :)
You should depend on it when it does what you need. When it's insufficient, override resizeSubviewsWithOldSize: and/or resizeWithOldSuperviewSize: (or see below).
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If you can target 10.7, look at the new constraint-based layout system. Check out the Cocoa Autolayout video from WWDC 2011.
You could also set minSize on your NSWindow to something large enough to prevent the singularity.
I'm not sure I'd say "fool," but refusing to use Interface Builder on the Mac is a very…avante-garde choice.
You should definitely use autosizing on your views.
Be maniacally attentive and spend lots of time making sure everything is right. (This is why I don't recommend going without Interface Builder. In general, what you get is a lot of wasted time that you could have spent doing something else.)
In this case, I think the best approach would be to set a sensible minimum height for the window. Don't let it get too small to display what it needs to display.
I have written an application. It works fine on some resolutions but most of the controls are over lapped when it is run on some other computers.
Is there any way of setting the application automatically when it is run on different computers?
Thanks
Furqan
You might want to take a look at this: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms229649.aspx
(assuming this is not WPF)
You can do a lot with docking and anchoring to help your form maintain it's usability at different sizes. But, there are practical limits. You can enforce a minimum size and ensure that your controls resize appropriately down to that limit.
I'm in the midst of porting a win32 app to cocoa. Wherever possible, I'm using IB, since... well its way easier in every way possible, obviously. One thing is the designer and the win32 dev set up all the button assets on a massive "sprite sheet" such you move around the viewport to determine button state. Similar to how yahoo does CSS sprites on their home page (http://d.yimg.com/a/i/ww/met/pa_icons/20100309/spr_apps_us.png)
Can IB be setup to handle this type sprite strip with the default buttons, or are we SOL on this one? I can certainly fire something up programmatically that would do this, but would like to incorporate as much of the default button behavior and selector hookup in IB.
Thoughts?
Josh
This isn't supported in IB because it is really not a Cocoa way of setting button images. I understand why you would use sprites in CSS but in a native program (on any platform) it seems really unnecessary and inefficient.
I honestly think it would be much less work for you to forget about using the sprites. Out of curiosity, are these buttons going to be for standard user interactions, or something more along the line of buttons for a game? If it is for standard user interactions (open file, change font, etc.) then I strongly recommend using the stock buttons as much as possible, although I understand that this might be out of your control. The reason is that the worst ported apps are usually the ones that try to keep visual fidelity with their Windows counterpart.
If i wanted to crop an image in VB.net, how would I go about doing it? I am trying to let the user drag out the box they want (system.drawing.rectangle), and it will automatically remove the edges surrounding the box.
My first problem is primarily the fact that I cannot make the system.drawing.rectangle visible. It is not displaying at all, I am setting its location and height programmatically, but nothing is showing up. I know there is probably something fairly obvious I am missing...but I cannot seem to find it.
My larger issue, however, lies with the cropping itself. I cannot find any crop methods, at all. Is there a hidden one I am missing? Or must I code it myself? How would I go about doing this? It ought to be able to output to a bitmap image object.
Thanks for the help, I am surprised this hasn't been asked on here before....
Regarding your first problem: a Rectangle isn't by itself visible. You have to draw it on your canvas using the Graphics object's DrawRectangle(...) method. For drawing a selection tool, you'll want to set your Pen object's DashCap and DashPattern properties.
To "crop" an image, you basically want to take the portion of a larger image delineated by a smaller Rectangle, and turn it into a new Bitmap. This can be done using one of the 30 overloads of the Graphics object's DrawImage(...) method. You can either keep the cropped portion in its original dimensions (resulting in a smaller Bitmap than your original), or you can "blow it up" to something like the original image's size. If you do the latter approach, it is usually a good idea to set your Graphics object's InterpolationMode property to HighQualityBicubic (I think that's the one, anyway), since the default InterpolationMode is pretty crappy.
There are a number of different ways of rendering images in .Net - it might help if you posted some of your code, along with an explanation of the exact problems you're running into.
Here is another answer with a link to a sample app (and source code in C#, sorry) that may help you get started.
There are a number of articles on these topics on CodeProject:
Pick your favorite flavor (though I encourage you to check out the C# projects - it shouldn't be too hard to convert).
VB
Image Cropping with Image Resizing Using vb.net
C#
Cropping Images
An Easy to Use Image Resizing and Cropping Control
Image Processing using C# (see the Cropping section - I was able to use this code in one of my projects)
WPF/C#
WPF Interactive Image Cropping Control
A Photoshop-like Cropping Adorner for WPF