I've been playing around with Codename One for a while now, but I can't seem to design a layout that I had planned with the layout managers provided. How should I go about designing the following layout?
I want a component on the left with a specific width, a component on the right with a specific width, and a center component that stretches or shrinks to the space that is leftover by the other two. If this was an html/css table, it would be something like:
<td style="width:50px;"></td><td style="width:auto;"></td><td style="width:50px;"></td>
TableLayout gets close, but the widths are defined in percentages only. BorderLayout and GridLayout bases the sizes on the prefered size of the largest component, but the setPreferedSize() method is deprecated, and setSameWidth() is suggested instead, but that doesn't seem to do what I need it to in this circumstance.
If you want a component to have the right size for the image just place the image as an icon in a label and its preferred size will be the size of the image+padding which should give you exactly the effect you want by default.
Notice that the server sent images should differ in size based on the device DPI otherwise your app might look ridiculous on some devices. See this course for how we handle image requests to the server: https://www.udemy.com/build-mobile-ios-apps-in-java-using-codename-one/
Related
I'm using the SpanLabel Component, but on the screen the text content does not occupying the full width when text size is lower
Someone can help please?
This can happen if the width isn't deterministic. The SpanLabel won't be able to reflow and at best will cause only its own Container to resize. There are two solutions:
Deterministic hierarchy - this is generally best but not always possible
Use TextArea - sometimes this works around the issue by reducing the hierarchy depth.
Deterministic layout means that the size of the elements is determined in a clear way by the hierarchy. E.g. BoxLayout.Y is deterministic on the X axis as it gives the components on the X axis all available space. FlowLayout isn't deterministic as it gives components their preferred size.
Some layouts can go back and forth and vary in determinism based on their axis.
This is important because when we layout the components we go from top down. So we go through the Form to its children asking each for their preferred size. If at this point the SpanLabel doesn't know its size it can give the wrong value and we can't really fix that later as we don't reflow the UI. Reflow would create a potential infinite loop and a performance problem at best.
We try to workaround some of this behavior by making a revalidate() call within TextArea but that has its limits. If the hierarchy is too deep the preferred size is already set and won't adapt. SpanLabel is just a Container with a TextArea and a Label (for the icon). So by only using a TextArea you'd slightly simplify the hierarchy and it sometimes might be enough. E.g.
TextArea t = new TextArea(myText);
t.setEditable(false);
t.setFocusable(false);
t.setUIID("Label");
I'm using the default theme, which I understand is effectively the theme for the platform.
If I put my menu items in the side menu, they show up way too small. If I put them in the overflow menu, the show up way too big. I don't know the UUIDs for the components that display them, so I don't know how to override the font. Here are some examples:
Here they are in a side menu. As you can see, about five of them fit in the width of a penny. These are too small to be usable.
.
Here they are in the overflow menu. They're enormous. I couldn't fit two of them in the width of a penny.
.
Here are some menus from a native application. In this example, you can see both the side menus and the overflow menus, which are a little big bigger, but they're both about 3 to the width of a penny. This is a very sensible size for my phone.
.
I never see these objects in code, so I can't fiddle with their Style objects. And I can't find them in the Resource Editor. Can anyone tell me how I can get these to show up in a sensible size?
Use the more modern flat themes (blue, red, orange), the older native themes needs to be updated to use the Toolbar and the side menu.
The style for the overflow is "Command" and for the side commands is "SideCommand" make sure the styles Fonts are declared using mm and not pixels to allow it to adjust to different resolutions.
Since it's a bit difficult to explain, I did a mockup to get across as much as possible visually:
http://sassmeister.com/gist/70624a740b1ca4ae7764
(If there's a better way to share a sass gist, let me know. First time using it)
Basically, this is the layout I want for a tablet in landscape mode. What I'm trying to do is make sure it fits perfectly on different tablets with different aspect ratios. Some things are fixed. The main content area is a 16x9 video, so that aspect is locked.
I have the header and footer (main column only) fixed right now as they need to be for portrait mode, but I could bring them into the regular flow if it's helpful for tablet landscape. Anyway, it's all basic responsive right now via susy2, and the sidebar is totally separate so it can scroll independent of the main content. What I would like is for the whole main area including header and footer to fit perfectly with even margins above and below vid, but then have the sidebar column change it's width to match the tablet.
So... if the tablet is wider, the teaser thumbnails go out to 16x9 ratio. If the tablet is narrower, the main column remains unchanged, but the teaser thumbs narrow down to squares.
If it's easier first to just figure out how to responsively shrink the right column only, so the aspect of thumbs is unchanged, that's ok. I just don't want the overall layout to get screwed up on one device vs another because of aspect ratio, so main focus is that the header hits top, footer hits bottom, main vid fits perfectly between them, then sidebar responds to fill in the rest (within reason).
thx for any input. First time making a website here, so lots to learn.
ps. I had vertical scroll enabled for the right column, but disabled it (by adding extra letter to to the scrolling class in scss column) since it's not actually letting me scroll. Not sure if that's because there's no actual content, or it doesn't recognize the empty padded cells as something worthy of scrolling.
You're biting off a lot for your first website, but Sassmeister is a great way to show what you are doing. I approve. :)
One of the problems you'll find is that CSS don't have the concept of aspect ratio built in, so the sort of layout you are attempting is non-trivial. CSS is best at handling widths, and letting everything overflow vertically. It takes some effort to make it handle height well.
If you can get away with it (depending on browser support), your best option is to use flexbox. Flexbox should make this much easier, but doesn't ave a lot of support yet. You could consider table-cells, which have more support, but can be harder to control.
In any case, you should ignore most of Susy for this — at least in laying out the large sections. If you want Susy to help you with grid calculations, ditch the mixins and just use the span() and gutter() functions to help you set widths. Something like this:
.flexbox {
flex: 1;
flex-basis: span(3);
}
.tables {
display: table-cell;
width: span(3);
}
// NOT THIS
.no {
#include span(3);
}
You can go back to using Susy mixins for simpler bits, like the items in the top navigation.
My aim is to have 3 images shrink, grow, and move along a horizontal axis depending on selection. Using Auto Layout seems to make the images jump about as they try to fulfil the Top space to superview / Bottom space to superview constraints.
So to combat this I have put all the images inside their own UIView. The UIView is set to the maximum size the images can grow to, it is centred on the horizontal axis. So now all the images must do is stay centred inside their corresponding UIView. This has fixed my problem as the UIViews perform the horizontal translation, while the images shrink/grow inside while remaining centred. My question is - is this the correct way to do this? It seems very long and like I am perhaps misusing the ability of Auto Layout. I have to perform similar tasks with more images and so any advice is welcome! Thanks.
I've just written a little essay on this topic here:
How do I adjust the anchor point of a CALayer, when Auto Layout is being used?
Basically autolayout does not play at all well with any kind of view transform. The easiest solution is to take your view out of autolayout's control altogether, but alternatively you can give it only constraints that won't fight back against the particular kind of transform you intend to apply. That second solution sounds like just the sort of thing you're doing.
My developer's box has a screen resolution of 1680 x 1050. I'm developing a full-screen Silverlight 3 application that I'm considering deploying to the Internet. So, I want to make sure the application looks good on a variety of screen resolutions. I just started testing on other boxes, the first one having a screen resolution of 1024 x 768. During the test I found some of the pages on the application were partially truncated. It seems the controls on the page didn't adjust for the lower screen resolution. So, I'm looking for some tips on how to make a Silverlight application, to the extent possible, adjust for screen resolution. For example, are there things one should or should not do on XAML to make adapting to screen resolution easier? Should I just optimize for a minimum screen resolution? Your thoughts and suggestions are welcomed.
You can easily enforce a minimum acceptable resolution by setting the MinHeight and MinWidth properties of your root visual. (Of course, this should be less than the minimum screen resolution to account for browser chrome.)
Try to specify absolute Width and Height only when necessary: for example, for images or icons of fixed dimensions, or for obvious cases like TextBoxes (whose width should reflect the average length of the data entered).
Grid panels are excellent for mixing scalable and fixed layout areas. The star sizing specification takes a bit of getting used to--it's not as simple as a percentage-based proportioning--but it's much more flexible, especially in combination with row/column min/max dimensions.
You don't really need to test on multiple resolutions unless you're interested in testing a range of dots per inch--just resize the browser to approximate different screens. Since there's always a bit of give and take depending on the user's browser configuration, you'll have to account for some variance anyway.
You can make your application scale with the Silverlight Toolkit ViewBox or make it strech with layout controls like the Grid, StackPanel, and WrapPanel. Make your main UserControl have a Width and Height of Auto (or remove the width and height entirely) and the size of the app will resize to the size of the parent div (the default HTML template uses 100%x100%). Then just resize the browser accordingly. IE8 has developer tools that can help you see your app resized to specific screen resolutions.
Testing on a variety of screen resolutions is always a good idea.
I covered the resizing of elements and making it resolution independent on another thread.
You can have a look here, there are multiple ways to sizing and resizing things automatically.