Newbie: Win32Lib: copyright question; controls cross-coupled?;
- Posted by Dan Moyer <DanMoyer at PRODIGY.NET> Sep 13, 1999
- 441 views
Hello all, some newbie questions, if that's ok: I'm making a program by "grafting" some existing programs ("hecnor"s multiplication table exerciser from the archive, & the "list with a twist" example program from the Win32 Tutorial by Ad Rienks & Wolfgang Fritz), & I have some questions I hope someone can help me with. 1. "hecnor"s program is copyrighted, so how do I go about trying to get his permission to alter it & let people use it & offer it to the archive? (There's no email address accompanying the program.) 2. I ran into a weird bug(?) with the graft of "list with a twist", namely that a click on one control caused the effect of a click on another. The multiplication exerciser has 4 buttons with possible answers to a multiplication problem, and the list box has "ones" through "twelves" in it, set up to set one of the multipliers. The problem arose when I made that connection be "immediate" upon selection of the multiplier from the list; what happened then was that when the user selected the RIGHT answer, a new problem was immediately generated (when it should NOT be), which usually made that previous "right" choice now WRONG. I could see no way at all that it was being caused by mal-programming on my part, & was about to ask you all here if you could figure out what was going wrong, when I looked more closely at what was HAPPENING, rather than looking at the code, & I noticed that when I clicked on the ANSWER button, the SELECTED item in the list box "blinked" briefly; now if I HAD clicked on an item on the list, that WOULD have generated a new multiplication problem, but I HADN'T, I had clicked on the ANSWER button. It was as if the program "thought" I had clicked in the list when I hadn't. So I inserted a "setFocus" command to another button, to take focus away from the list box, & that solved the problem. But my extremely limited knowledge about programming for windows leads me to think it shouldn't have really happened like that in the first place, since other controls, specifically the answer buttons, were utilized by the program AFTER list box item selection by the user. Is this "control cross-coupling" a normal thing to be regularly addressed by the programmer, or is it some kind of bug? 3. And, a more general question/problem: I have my Win98 system set up to display BIG TEXT & ICONS, and almost every program I have looked at in Euphoria for windows has had problems on my system of not having enough room on buttons & other controls to show all the text. I regularly correct this, by making the values for the size of the controls bigger, but my concern is that I have NEVER seen this problem in other programs (except one: the toolbar in windows explorer doesn't show everything), & I suspect that controls I make "ok" for my system may look way too big for their text on OTHER systems. I remember someone here on this list saying something once about "if it's allowed by windows, it should be handled correctly by Euphoria", or something like that, so I wonder if this isn't an instance of that? I've noticed the problem in both Win32Lib and VEL. Thanks, Dan Moyer