Anybody thinking mobile or IDEs of the current decade?

[Paul Breen]

The discussion about modifying Lynx got me thinking about powerbasic.

The discussion about problems with this code bring out a problem that programming with pb has, the lack of layout managers for GUI design. I do not see why we still are dealing with fixed coordinates or pixel numbers during GUI design. Obscure references in the xml manifest just do not cut it. The programming language should take care those kind of of details. Java has at least four layout managers and it works very well. I am not advocating Java here, just pointing out that the kind of problems caused by dpi and fixed coordinates belong to an age when there was only vga, ega, etc.

Everybody has a different size monitor now, and different height to width ratios. For example I like large text but my customer with young eyes likes small text. How is powerbasic going to get into mobile devices using this (latest and greatest) technology? Additionally, I would like to make apps that work in cell phones.

What happened to Phoenix and Dominic Mitchell's attempts to bring layout managers to GUI design?

[Christopher Boss]

If you are refering to autosizing as "layout" then yes, the ability to have controls automatically sized when a form is resized is very important.

The problem is that autosizing is not something built into the operating system, but requires custom code to accomplish this.

I believe FireFly 3 has something like this now, similar Dominics Phoenix.

Even EZGUI 5.0 now has an autosizing engine and the ability to define autosize properties.

For PowerBasic to add this to DDT and PBForms, they would have to write their own autosizing engine to accomplish this. Now with PB 10, they could write a SLL, which could be used along with PB Forms, but this would also require an update in PB Forms.