CyphersTECH Consulting » class http://www.cypherstech.com turning possibilities in to realities Sun, 16 May 2010 15:29:05 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 REALbasic and Snow Leopard: Redraw what?! http://www.cypherstech.com/2010/01/realbasic-and-snow-leopard-redraw-what/ http://www.cypherstech.com/2010/01/realbasic-and-snow-leopard-redraw-what/#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 05:15:35 +0000 Anthony G. Cyphers http://www.cypherstech.com/?p=746 A customer has tasked me with updating some of the UI elements in their application. Among the problems they listed was a redraw bug in Snow Leopard, where the controls on windows with a set background color would display a slightly different color in their background even with the Composite property set to True. After about an hour of testing different workarounds, I found what I believe to be an excellent solution.

In this application, all of the windows have a set background color, but only a few displayed the error. I had absolutely no luck in determining the difference, so I can only assume that it’s an inconsistent REALbasic bug. Here’s how I fixed it:

  1. Add a new object to your project, mine is named “WindowHack,” and set it’s Super to “Window.”
  2. Open the window subclass, and navigate to the “Paint” event.
  3. Inside the “Paint” event, add the following block of code:
    #if TargetMacOS then
    If Me.HasBackColor Then
    g.ForeColor = me.BackColor
    g.FillRect( 0, 0, g.Width, g.Height )
    End If
    #endif
  4. Now set the Super of the windows with the problem to “WindowHack” and test.

This seemed to be the most elegant solution I could find to the problem and, quite honestly, the root of the issue still eludes me. Any thoughts on what might be causing this inconsistency?

]]> http://www.cypherstech.com/2010/01/realbasic-and-snow-leopard-redraw-what/feed/ 0 RB: Hate that flicker http://www.cypherstech.com/2009/08/rb-hate-that-flicker/ http://www.cypherstech.com/2009/08/rb-hate-that-flicker/#comments Sun, 30 Aug 2009 20:24:53 +0000 Anthony G. Cyphers http://www.cypherstech.com/?p=293 I’m currently working on a project for a client that requires a cross-platform UI class which is pretty standard. It has working alternatives on Windows, Mac, Linux, and anything else you can think of. They want a certain style within the application, regardless of OS, and I don’t blame them for it.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy…so what’s the problem? Windows + REALBasic = Problem. We all know that flicker on Win32 is a pain in RB. I’ve managed, over the years, to work out a system to negate that issue. Except, of course, in this circumstance.

We have a custom UI class, inside that we have a PagePanel, and inside that we have various different elements. On Mac, everything works beautifully. Once we switch over to Win32, however…ugh. See, that class itself is flicker-free. Until we put the PagePanel on it and start changing values, that is. Anytime that PagePanel’s value changes, our entire custom class has to be redrawn with one of those beautiful little flickers. What a pain.

About the only thing I can think of to get around this problem, would be to manage showing/hiding of child elements in code, and drop the PagePanel. Of course, that’s not the route we want to take with this project.

Anyone else have an idea?

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