AutoHotkey Community

[newpie]

Hello, just wanted to say I love this tool. When I got my new laptop with Windows 7 I have been experiencing problems with the function when you highlight a box around multiple objects and want to move them to another place. The problem is that it starts to make the "see thru" box, but doesn't continue and cannot be seen (like it dissappears). It didn't happen when I had XP.
Does the "SmartGUI Creator XP Mod v4.3u DOWNLOAD " fix this issue?

Thanks for any help.

[justjim]

SmartGUI is 6 years old, but this is still a useful app. Thanks to Rajat for the original, and Drugwash for your continuing work.

But it's too hard to follow its development on this topic. The original source is available, but is not distributed in a friendly way - you need to save the page as text, then do some minor editing before it will run. Then you need to run the .exe to get the resource files that go along with the .ahk source. Then finally gather everything up in a folder. Why?

The original author has not posted on this forum since 2 years. Is it safe to say he will not likely return soon to continue his work?

And it is time-consuming and inconvenient searching this topic for the best version. This discourages people from using SmartGUI, and also discourages developers from contributing.

SmartGUI's home site says it is Open Source, but there is no license stated. Not sure if it can really be considered open-source without some license, or at least a statement. As it is, a person would not even be required to credit the original author, correct?

All of this taken together might be slowing the progress of SmartGUI, which is an excellent app as it stands, but which also has the potential to be greater.

So (finally) my point - SmartGUI would benefit from choosing one of the available open-source licenses, and being hosted on github, or bitbucket to encourage user and developer participation.

Just thoughts, thanks.

[newpie]

Thanks justjim for your info, I was not aware. I hope a programmer out there will take this up and update it for windows 7 as you suggested in last point.

Thanks again.

[justjim]

Well, I spent some more time trying to understand the Gui positioning and size options, and along with the Attach function, I would say it is easier to create a flexible Gui by hand.

[newpie]

I usually just use gui creator for rough start and then add what I want later manually. It is just the feature of dragging and selecting an entire area which is screwed up that I wish could be fixed.

[Drugwash]

@ newpie: One issue that I'm aware of is the following: if a Groupbox has been defined prior to all other controls present within that groupbox, none of the said controls would be multi-selectable.
It is possible though that the issue you reported exists too. I will perform some tests under Windows 7 and see if I can reproduce - and if so, fix - the issue. Thank you for reporting it. The 4.3u version doesn't fix that particular issue but another one related to vertical coordinates, as mentioned in that post.

@ justjim: I agree the updates and development are hard to follow in this thread. To be honest, after all the difficulties I've encountered while adding new features and/or fixing old bugs, at some point a strong thought come to my mind to ditch the current version and take it from scratch. Unfortunately, real life problems - especially lack of Internet connection at my current home - determined me to pause development of current version and hold off any new one.

As for the source code being hosted on an external site, I'd see that as superfluous. A fresh thread in this forum would suffice, but for now it'd be hard for me to keep it updated.

Anyway, the source of the mod is available separately within the package and should run without any alteration. The licence would be GPL, same as AHK, unless Rajat mentioned otherwise.

[newpie]

Thank you DrugWash. Let me give the steps just to help you reproduce;

1. With an existing gui boxes(edit or text) on the screen
2. Start to Drag highlightable box
3. You will notice that it only starts the box, but doesn't continue to follow
your mouse, but is invisible.

Hope this helps.

[Drugwash]

Yes, thank you, I just managed to reproduce the issue; apparently the selection size is limited to a small rectangle; however the selection works according to mouse position. I will check the code and see to fix it. It may take some time before posting a new version, so please bear with me.
In the mean time you may manually select the desired controls in the left-hand window (click 'Advanced').

[newpie]

Thank you Drugwash, no rush. I am just glad I have this tool in the first place it saves a ridicoulous amount of time when doing scripts.
Thanks

[Drugwash]

OK, I've performed a few tests under Win7 and noticed the OS is behaving differently compared to older versions: it doesn't allow a tooltip resize to a size bigger than initial one. The original script creates a tooltip with two SPACE characters as text (a trick to make it look empty), so Win7 creates a tooltip no larger than two spaces wide and one character high, with no possibility of a later increase in size. Dunno if this is a bug or by design, but as you already noticed, it screws up this script and most likely all others that perform the same operation.

Now... I don't have any documentation at hand to see if this behavior can be overriden through DllCall() or other means, so all I could crop up in this short time is a hack: the script creates a fairly large tooltip, initially, then it downsizes it according to mouse position. The down size of this approach is that the selection may not be large enough to hold all desired controls, in a very large GUI. However, any controls missing from the selection could easily be selected by clicking their name in the multi-selection list.

Please keep posting any other bugs or issues you may encounter further on.

Here's the modified version:
SmartGUI XP Mod v4.3v

[newpie]

Thanks I will try it out.

[Lucid_Method]

Hey Drugwash, are you still doing anything with SmartGui these days? I'm glad I came across your post, I've been working on an update for SmartGUI (titled SmartGui+) that is going to tie together a few things that I use on a regular basis. Scanning over your release notes it looks like you've covered areas I haven't played with, maybe if we can combine our efforts we can put together a new version of SmartGUI. I love the tool, but it falls short in a number of areas when working with multiple projects or extracting from a project and being able to save the data back into a project.

I want to tie together the some of the plugins from the standard library for graphics in tabs, menus, and buttons. Right now I have it setup to export a gui that automatically make your GUI scaleable using Attach. SmartGUI didn't work with Handles very well, I set it up with an option to auto-insert handles, variables, and other elements automatically to be able to generate interfaces with icons quickly.

What I'm working on still has a ways to go, but I like where it is headed. I use AHK daily, so I have a lot of motivation to build a tool to help me work faster. Please PM me if you or any other SmartGUI fans might be up for helping out.
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[Lucid_Method]

Drugwash: I just tried out your version of SmartGUI, nice job You've fixed a number of things I've noticed needed work.
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[SoLong&Thx4AllTheFish]

@Lucid_Method: just to be sure you have seen it, have a look at lil builder
as well:
http://www.autohotkey.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20097
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[Lucid_Method]

hugov: I have seen Lil Builder but it didn't work for me last time I tried it. I just gave it another shot, looks nice, definitely some good ideas to attempt to incorporate.

Aside from having more controls, is there anything else significant that sets Lil Builder apart from SmartGUI?
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