Some day when everything works perfectly, when there are no ideas for new features left, here’s something to consider.
One less than optimal feature of Pan6 was the sometimes very long list of Procedures. PanX allowed us to dramatically shorten that by putting code into objects and allowing multiple procedures to be put into one big procedure and calling them with a Callwithin statement.
I wish I could do something similar with Forms, i.e., put several forms into one item on the list and call them with a callwithin type statement. I have no idea whether this would be easy or impossible, so I am not holding my breath. If I could do that, I would change a recent not-very-big project from 24 forms to 6. This would appeal to those who like an uncluttered work space.
Interesting idea. I think tab panels could be used for that purpose in some cases. I have made almost no use of tab panels. For some cases, however, they would not help. But in some cases, they would not be helpful. I have numerous forms I use for dialogs with Rundialog; I don’ think tab panels could do that. I also suspect tab panels are not a great idea of completely different forms where I really don’t the user to switch between them.
Note that you can disable the Show Tab Buttons for the Tab Panel and only switch tabs when you need to by changing the variable for the current tab panel form. This way the main Tab Panel form does not look like a tab panel but just a normal form.
Here is a thought – what if there was an option to exclude a form from the View menu? It would then be accessible only from the View Organizer and View Search, leaving the View menu uncluttered. I suppose this might also be a useful option for procedures.
I think that could be very useful. Initially, I imagine excluding forms that are not likely to be accessed; once they are developed and finished, they can be excluded from the View Menu.
I really like this idea, and I thought maybe I could knock it out in an hour or so. As if! It wound up taking more than a day, but I think it is a very nice improvement. I hope many of you will eventually take advantage of it, not just Tom.
With this new feature you can exclude individual forms and/or procedures either from a checkbox in their property panel, or using the View Organizer (which makes it easy to relatively quickly exclude/include a bunch of forms or procedures). Or you can also exclude the Data Sheet from the View menu, or all forms and/or all procedures. For example, if you have a bunch of forms that are used for dialog boxes, you can now exclude them from the View menu so that it will be less cluttered (since you would never access them from the View menu).
Note that this is not a security feature, you can still easily access any excluded items by using the View Organizer or View Search windows, and you can also force the full View menu to appear by holding down the option key (there are other mechanisms available if you want to lock down procedures securely). Basically this is a convenience feature to help you remove unnecessary clutter from the View menu.
If you’d like to get a preview of how this will work, it’s all fully documented:
Of course these options are also accessible and settable via formulas and programming code, and included in blueprints. Add it all up, plus documentation, and it takes a full day (slightly more) to implement a seemingly trivial new feature.