-
AHHHHHHHH I had constant crashes with the style manager in XE2 - now I see that little has been done to remedy matters in XE3,4 and 5!  Random AV's, stuff not drawing - you can't easily build a style up from scratch still because half the objects (like the new font or colour objects used in the styling system) cannot be added to a new style without editing the actual text - I can see this is going to drive me mad again!

Comments

  1. Paul ThorntonSeptember 30, 2013 at 8:58 AM

    I feel your pain. The style editor is horrible. Other annoyances:

    - It doesn't have it's own tab. It just appears 'over' the main form. You need to close it before the form reappears.
    - Clicking on an item in the editor does absolutely nothing.
    - The only way to delete an item is to click the barely visible little button in the structure view.

    + Numerous other issues.

    They need to scrap it and start again. Feels like a complete hack :(

    ReplyDelete
  2. Paul FosterSeptember 30, 2013 at 9:00 AM

    all of those issues were a problem with xe2 as well

    ReplyDelete
  3. Paul FosterSeptember 30, 2013 at 9:03 AM

    oh god. access violation again!!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Paul FosterSeptember 30, 2013 at 9:14 AM

    AHHHHHH I am going to take a hammer to this in a moment - good grief the xe2 version was bad, but they have had the past 3 years to fix the bloody thing.  I can't believe this is still how they expect you to edit and create styles!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Bill MeyerSeptember 30, 2013 at 9:49 AM

    Paul Foster To be fair, only two years. ;) XE2 was released 2 Sept 2011.
    http://delphi.wikia.com/wiki/Delphi_Release_Dates

    ReplyDelete
  6. Paul ThorntonSeptember 30, 2013 at 9:57 AM

    Think of the poor guys that are designing the built in styles. They must be going nuts :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Randy MagruderSeptember 30, 2013 at 10:24 AM

    Hard to take anything seriously that uses the word "expresso"

    ReplyDelete
  8. Paul FosterSeptember 30, 2013 at 12:36 PM

    I don't think anyone at emb that is building these system styles up is using the FM Style manager in the IDE at all.  I think that 1) everything is now scaled bitmaps (BOOOO) 2) they use the "bitmap style designer" to build the android styles up.  God knows why they are using bitmaps so much, I thought the smoking ape was supposed to be vector drawn??

    ReplyDelete
  9. Bill MeyerSeptember 30, 2013 at 12:47 PM

    Paul Foster Hmmmmmm....  :)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Paul FosterSeptember 30, 2013 at 12:49 PM

    Am I wrong?  Wasn't XE2's FM sold to the world as the first business class vector drawn environment?

    ReplyDelete
  11. Paul ThorntonSeptember 30, 2013 at 12:59 PM

    Paul Foster - I think it would be an incredibly difficult task to build an iOS or Android style in vectors. Even with bitmaps it is possible to see some subtle differences. Having said that, I think the styles are OK. My biggest problem is performance. Try making a TTabControl perform a slide transition between two pages with more than a couple of controls on each page.. Native iOS is wonderfully smooth, FM gets way less FPS and looks awful. It's not hard to see why when you look at the code (ugh!). Each page is redrawn for every step and with FMs low performance it cripples the animation.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Paul FosterSeptember 30, 2013 at 2:09 PM

    Paul Thornton indeed, likewise add a nontrivial number of items to a list box and the performance dies. I have yet to try a proper business ui in it, I had similar problems in xe2 but I think that generally it performs better now than before.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment