People have this scaling objects on the panels issue all wrong. You don't scale ALL your objects, just 1 or 2. I honestly don't see what the obsession is with this issue of scaling the actual objects to match the resolution. Why would you want your buttons or your fonts to get bigger? Customers want to see more stuff on the screen so they go to a higher resolution. You reward them by filling up the spaces with larger buttons, bigger decorations and bigger fonts, thanks a lot. My frustration in the past has been file dialog boxes or lists of items with multiple columns. There was never a way to resize the window to see more data, more information. I couldn't care less about the font size or button size. Right now I run on a 1280x1024 desktop. Wether I run 800x600, 1024x768 or my current 1280x1024, Windows leaves all my objects the same size but I get more desktop space to work with. The same I believe is true for Apple systems.
Greg Mckascle:
> The typical behavior is to choose a few objects, typically the largest
> objects in the panel and have those adapt to the new window size.
> This control may be a graph, in which case the size taken by the scales,
> cursors and buttons around the graph are normally held fixed, and
> the plotting area grows. If the major area is a table, the table grows
> to show more cells. If the major area is a list or a tree,
> they give access to more cells. I love using dialogs like these that
> grow, and thankfully, many UIs on OSX and XP are moving
> in this direction, but I also know that they are considerably harder
> to implement. Thus far, I can't think of any of them short of magnifying
> utilities that just make the fonts larger or make the pixels larger. If
> they do have a capability, to change the fonts and object sizes, they
> usually choose to do this with a zoom ring at the top of the panel,
> such as is done in the office products, in web browsers, PDF viewers, etc.
> There are apps like PowerPoint, that when they resize the slide preview,
> they grow the fonts, but the rest of the window objects do not resize,
> and so I put them in the resize one object category.
I agree.
One under-utilized feature is the lock objects and group objects tool. I agree that now you can scale only one object, but a caveat is that you must lock and group all other objects surrounding the resizing object or else they move around during re-sizing of the panel and they never fall back to their original position. Also a tip: If you want to get around the resize 1 object limitation just group multiple objects together and then select the "scale object with panel". This will allow you to do things like resize two graphs that are side by side with each other while keeping everything else the same.
We should realize that most applications are programmed for 640x480 base and then they plan for the panel scaling upwards. So in LabVIEW the 640x480 would be considered the "min. panel size" option in vi properties. This is important because if you resize your panel down below the base designed resolution then LabVIEW squishes all objects past each other.
Having said all this we must not just look at this as a LabVIEW issue only. I've downloaded many shareware utilities and non- "mainstream" apps that have a total disregard for their own panel sizing and desktop resolution.
