I just wanted to let everyone know what's going on with 2.06 and the latest round of updates.  Here's what's coming in 2.06:

- New set of "Desktop" control interfaces (see attached image).  These control interfaces are more oriented to a desktop application and are quite a bit more "crisp".  They look like a more squared-off Bootstrap UI.

- New Controls Demo project that uses all available controls in one project

- New clElevateHot* colors added

- New TMenuBar control for horizontal menus that can contain drop-down menus

- New TSpinner control for animated spinner icons

- New TDataSet BeforeLoadColumns, OnLoadColumnsError, and AfterLoadColumns events

- TGrid control now allows for shift-clicks for sorting, and clears when not used

- New StartOfWeek property for TFormatSettings class

- New SpellCheck property for the TEdit and TMultiLineEdit controls

- Greatly improved drawing performance in the designers

- Improved load performance of applications

- New TBasicPanel AutoSize property

Plus there are 40+ fixes coming.  Right now I'm finishing up the TMenuBar, as well as debugging some of the new auto-sizing functionality, so it looks like the release will be early next week.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim Young [Elevate Software] wrote:

>  Here's what's coming in 2.06:

All sounds good!

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Matthew Jones

Excellent!!

Walter

I love the new control interfaces!

Looks like an exciting release.

= Steve

Awesome, as always.

Erick

Of course, I'm a bit of a liar....the auto-sizing functionality hit a snag, so it's going to be a few days later than expected:

Bad news: I'm needing to split the AutoSize property out into two separate Height/Width sub-properties, so a breaking change will be coming.

Good news: Having the auto-sizing as a primitive for things other than text is fantastic, and is eliminating a *lot* of boilerplate code in the controls that ship with EWB.  Plus, it makes such processing faster because it pushes it down into the layout code where it belongs, so auto-sizing decisions are made *during* layout, not after the layout has already occurred.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Tim Young [Elevate Software] wrote:

>  needing to split the AutoSize property out into two separate Height/Width sub-properties

Will it be possible for the IDE to handle this nicely? So it can read a form, set both to the current value, and then save as new? I realise you don't want it in the runtime etc, but the IDE would make for a nice conversion.

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Matthew Jones

Hi,

That is great. Have you had a chance to look at values for a TListBox and the TComboBox's? You once replied on this wish that it always was your wish too if you worked with a new environment. So I had my hopes high, but you seem to have been too busy?

Greeting,
Ronald





Tim Young [Elevate Software] wrote:

I just wanted to let everyone know what's going on with 2.06 and the latest round of updates.  Here's what's coming in 2.06:

- New set of "Desktop" control interfaces (see attached image).  These control interfaces are more oriented to a desktop application and are quite a bit more "crisp".  They look like a more squared-off Bootstrap UI.

- New Controls Demo project that uses all available controls in one project

- New clElevateHot* colors added

- New TMenuBar control for horizontal menus that can contain drop-down menus

- New TSpinner control for animated spinner icons

- New TDataSet BeforeLoadColumns, OnLoadColumnsError, and AfterLoadColumns events

- TGrid control now allows for shift-clicks for sorting, and clears when not used

- New StartOfWeek property for TFormatSettings class

- New SpellCheck property for the TEdit and TMultiLineEdit controls

- Greatly improved drawing performance in the designers

- Improved load performance of applications

- New TBasicPanel AutoSize property

Plus there are 40+ fixes coming.  Right now I'm finishing up the TMenuBar, as well as debugging some of the new auto-sizing functionality, so it looks like the release will be early next week.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Matthew,

<< Will it be possible for the IDE to handle this nicely? >>

Absolutely - the IDE will automatically read and convert the AutoSize property from a boolean to a class instance.

The only gotcha will be that any custom control interfaces will need to be opened and saved in order to have the new property format be saved to disk.  All of the standard control interfaces will be taken care of.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Ronald,

<< That is great. Have you had a chance to look at values for a TListBox and the TComboBox's? You once replied on this wish that it always was your wish too if you worked with a new environment. >>

I'm holding off on a key-value implementation for the TListBox/TButtonComboBox/TEditComboBox until I look into a much better idea, the idea of "content classes".  I'm trying to resolve all of these issues with multi-varied item display and construction with one design that can allow the developer to sub-class the base content class and then use it in a control as the "items".  Doing this would allow developers to create fairly complicated layouts for the items in a list box, etc. as well as store any data, including data that is comprised of parts that are displayed, as well as parts that are only used in the data, such as the case with code->description lookups.

The basic idea here is that we need to keep the code size down in compiled applications, and so would only ever need one TListBox controls, not five or six different TListBox controls that only differ in how they get their data or how they display it.

Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com