OK, dinner done, and I’ve checked all my download file names too!
This will ramble a bit and you will like some of it but not all, but please bear with me.
I am 74. I have a, thankfully slow acting, incurable cancer. I write programs only for my benefit. I put them on my web site just on the off chance somebody else can make use of them. So given that I have other things to do in an unknown time frame, I do things that I want to do. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be persuaded to want things you might want!
Whilst I spent around 50 years doing software, mainly at a very senior level, across all sorts of application areas, one of the constant themes across all of those areas was Testing. The most important two lessons that I learnt from that is that the cost of fixing bugs increases exponentially with the stage of the project, i.e. it gets very much worse over time. The other lesson is that the more lines of code you write then the number of bugs also increases exponentially. That latter makes me very wary of Options! Look at the average Office style application. There are loads of different ways of doing the same thing. Had I written such an app there would have been very few options, not because I wanted to be mean to users, or because I couldn’t be bothered, but simply to make the software more reliable than it usually is when “big tech” writes it.
So all of that colours what follows, but doesn’t solely define it!.
Moving the buttons I’m not likely to do because not only are there a different number of buttons that apply to the different panels, which would look untidy to my eyes, but there would need to be two Examine buttons. Some people may find two buttons less confusing, I find it more confusing because I think of the operation as “applies to any object”. I think that because that is how traditional Text adventures normally work, you type in “Examine Thing” regardless of where “Thing” is. Simple IF already diverges significantly from other platforms and I didn’t want to go too far in case that in itself puts people off. But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand the request! I shan’t say I’ll never do it your way, but it will be very much a back burner consideration until a bright idea strikes me!
As for colours, yes that seems reasonable, but as I implied above, I have this allergy to Options because they tend to just introduce bugs. So, I’ve got other things to do at the moment, (a blues weekend in Torquay this weekend for starters!) but that request is going on the To Do list, just don’t hold your breath. Keep checking the messages on my web site is the best I can say right now.
To everyone else, please don’t ask for window sizing. It is fairly easy when there are not many controls visible at any one time, but, despite its small size the Simple IF apps are unusually densely full of controls and there is no magic Windows command to do it for you, you have to resize and relocate everything yourself. It would double the code size of the generator!
