Hi,

I love the new about dialog and the animated information. :-) The pride and joy of a programmer - creating the about screen. ;-)

One not so great feature is when you resize the dialog (Lazarus IDE compiled with GTK2). The mini logo, Close button and page control tabs flicker like crazy!!

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

I cannot confirm it on Ubuntu 8.04 and GTK2

Darius

Under win32, logo and page controls do flicker, but Close button does not. Anyway, why is About dialog resizeable at all? The only reason to resize it would be
to increase the amount of visible credits, but the the animated area does not grow with the dialog, which looks rather amateurish, if you pardon the expression.

So I suggest disable resizing and thus fix both problems at once ;-)

No, that would be a workaround. The controls should not flicker. It's a bug somewhere.
BTW, fixed dialogs are against our design guide lines.

Mattias

I guess your lazarus version is not completely updated: http://svn.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi?view=rev&root=lazarus&revision=17035

Vincent

Alexander Klenin wrote

to increase the amount of visible credits, but the the animated area does not grow with the dialog, which looks rather amateurish, if you pardon the expression.

This was fixed in r17035

The flicker I cannot reproduce myself, not even on windows.

Darius

Darius Blaszyk wrote

> to increase the amount of visible credits, but the the animated area does > not grow with the dialog, which looks rather amateurish, if you pardon > the expression. This was fixed in r17035

I see. Sorry about the noise.
My internet connection is not fast enough to follow Lazarus development speed ;-)

The flicker I cannot reproduce myself, not even on windows.

It is more or less known issue, even in Delphi.
It is caused by the fact that Windows (and possibly GTK as well, judging by the existence of the same issue there)
sends WM_ERASEBKGND message before WM_PAINT message and (sometimes) displays the control in the state between messages. To solve this, Delphi has introduced DoubleBuffered(?) form property. To check this issue, you can use attached (debug-only!) patch which disables background erasing for AboutFrm. You can see that TImage with mini-logo stops flickering
and the flicker of page control is reduced (because the control itself still processes WM_ERASEBKGND).
Of course, this comes at a price of "transparent" form, so it is not a proper solution.

The flicker is inherent of TPaintBox (in fact of TGraphicControl). To avoid it would be necessary to descend of a TWinControl or create a TPaintBox like derived from TWinControl.

The below code is a workaround to avoid the flicker of a PaintBox inside a form. It overrides the EraseBackground proc of the form owning the PaintBox. Works only in win32 since ExcludeClipRect does has effect in gtk under this situation.

procedure TFormMain.EraseBackground (DC: HDC );
var
  ARect: TRect;
begin
  //avoid flickering in PaintBox under win32
  if DC = 0 then
    Exit;
  with PaintBoxMain do
    ExcludeClipRect(Dc, Left, Top, Left + Width, Top + Height);
  ARect := Rect(0, 0, Width,Height);
  FillRect(DC, ARect, Brush.Handle);
  SelectClipRGN(DC, 0);
end;

Luiz

Correct.

BTW, fixed dialogs are against our design guide lines.

That is good to hear. There is nothing worse than adjusting your DPI setting or Font, and then half the text aren't visible and you cannot resize the form. Good decision Mattias! :-)

Example:
I have a Vodafone 3G modem that came with dialup software (control panel thingy). On my laptop under Windows I run at 1920x1200 so have to use DPI of 120-130 read decently. With the 3G software, most of the dialogs are useless and the text and buttons etc are off screen and I can't resize the dialogs!! Idiots!

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Darius Blaszyk wrote

I cannot confirm it on Ubuntu 8.04 and GTK2 Darius

Hi Darius. I created a mantis bug report for this. I also uploaded a small 10sec video (600kb) to show the problem. You can see all the labels for version information, Close button and Page Control tabs flicker a lot.

http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=12433

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Darius Blaszyk wrote

> to increase the amount of visible credits, but the the animated area does > not grow with the dialog, which looks rather amateurish, if you pardon > the expression. This was fixed in r17035

By the way, this fix is not correct at least on Windows. It works only when the active page is "Contributors". It seems that otherwise ContribitorsPaintBox dimensions are not updated before FormResize event.

So, the correct fix would be to place FBuffer.Width/Height := ACanvas.Width/Height
directly into DrawScrollText procedure.
Sorry, no patch since SVN is not suited for managing patch queues, and I already have working copy modified with my previous patch.

Yup, same problem under GTK2. Resize the dialog while text is scrolling in Contributors tab. After the name Barts Broersma, the text stops appearing, until that name reaches the middle of the tab, then the other names start poping up, but don't scroll from the bottom of the screen.

See attached screenshot.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: about.png
Type: image/png
Size: 18730 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.lazarus.freepascal.org/pipermail/lazarus/attachments/20081018/5ddf82fc/attachment-0001.png

I changed TPaintBox to descend from TCustomControl and created a empty WMEraseBkgnd handler and the flicker is gone, at least on win32

Luiz

I love the new about dialog and the animated information. :-) The pride and joy of a programmer - creating the about screen. ;-)

I don't see any animated information on Lazarus' about dialog. :-P

I'm on Mac Leopard using latest FPC and Lazarus' SVN trunk. ;)

-Bee-

I don't see any animated information on Lazarus' about dialog. :-P I'm on Mac Leopard using latest FPC and Lazarus' SVN trunk. ;)

Strange? What does your Contributors tab look like? Before the text used to be in a memo and left aligned. Now it's a PaintBox, centre aligned text and scrolling upwards.

I don't know the exact revision the animation was introduced, but here I have v0.9.27 r17029 i386-linux-gtk 2 (beta) and I can see the animation.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Strange? What does your Contributors tab look like? Before the text used to be in a memo and left aligned. Now it's a PaintBox, centre aligned text and scrolling upwards.

Just an empty space. No text, no scrolling, no animation. :-D

I don't know the exact revision the animation was introduced, but here I have v0.9.27 r17029 i386-linux-gtk 2 (beta) and I can see the animation.

I got rev.17054 i386-mac-carbon. Should I file a bug report? ;)

-Bee-

Bee wrote

I got rev.17054 i386-mac-carbon. Should I file a bug report? ;)

I guess so. Do you have the contributors.txt file in your /lazarus/docs/ directory?

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

Same here. Contributors and Acknowledgements are both just blank. Contributors.txt and acknowledgements.txt are both in the docs folder.

Same svn rev here too. And yes, file a bug report.

Hi,
in the current trunk the doublebuffer bitmap (?), is not always resized with the form,
so sometimes the text scrolls only in a part of the window. And you could center the big Lazarus logo.

Benito

Benito van der Zander wrote

in the current trunk the doublebuffer bitmap (?), is not always resized with the form, so sometimes the text scrolls only in a part of the window.

I've already submitted a bug report for this.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/

This has been fixed in r17088. Graeme, can you send me the URL of the bugreport? I recall you mentioning this issue on the ML, but I cannot find the bugreport in the tracker. If it exists then I want to close it.

Darius

2008/10/21 Darius Blaszyk

This has been fixed in r17088. Graeme, can you send me the URL of the bugreport? I recall you mentioning this issue on the ML, but I cannot find the bugreport in the tracker. If it exists then I want to close it.

New bug, when you see scrolling and close dialog have error msg "acces violation"

And the scrolling don't start on bottom :(

regards

Darius Blaszyk wrote

This has been fixed in r17088. Graeme, can you send me the URL of the bugreport? I recall you mentioning this issue on the ML, but I cannot find the bugreport in the tracker. If it exists then I want to close it.

My mistake Darius... I thought I filed a bug report, but instead posted a screenshot to the ML showing the issue. Below is the message I responded to:

----------------------

Alexander Klenin wrote

to increase the amount of visible credits, but the the animated area does not grow with the dialog, which looks rather amateurish, if you pardon the expression.

This was fixed in r17035
-----------------------

I'll get a svn update and retest. I'm not at r17088 yet.

Regards,
- Graeme -

_______________________________________________
fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit
http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/