Re: Improved IMFApp

[Hans Ronne <hronne@comhem.se>]

>The image-loading progress report is a nice touch.

Thanks. It is interesting to see what images are causing problems, and on
what platforms. The terrain images (which usually contain a number of
subimages of different sizes) obviously take a long time to load. More
surprisingly, the pg images take a humongous time to load, but only under
Windows. I wonder why. They are just gifs, like the other images. And it's
not just that there are a lot of them to load - every single pg image takes
a very long time.

>I think the top-level window size is too big. In the ChangeLog, I think
>you said you changed it to 900x600 (which is much bigger than 640x480,
>and would be unwieldy at 800x600). Even at the 1024x768 resolution I
>prefer (my best monitor is 8 years old, and does not have a particularly
>good dot pitch, so higher resolutions are too hard to read text in), the
>window seems too big.

Both window size and position should ideally be scaled to the screen, but
this part of tcl is buggy. Caused a lot of problems in Xconq, too. I'll see
if I can get it to work properly.

>If the background color is changed to to black, the black text used for
>image names no longer shows up (not surprising), and setting the
>foreground color does not appear to remedy the situation
>(semi-surprising). Perhaps text color needs to be tied to foreground
>color, or else a separate text color submenu created.

Yes. There is definitely room for improvements also in the menu layout.
What is called "foreground color" is actually the background color of the
closeups and in the grid mode. And some menu options (" as unit" etc) do
nothing. I'm not even sure what Stan intended to do with these. The
corresponding tcl procedures were just empty shells.

>Slightly more ambitious idea: always set the image name text color to
>the diametrically opposite color of the background color.

This is how the selection box works in the MacOS native IMFApp. However, it
doesn't look too good, so I kept it black in the tcltk version. It is
therefore also invisible against black. We probably should set both text
and box to white in that case.

Hans

P.S. The "Selected as Terrain" option does nothing under Windows, but this
is because tiled drawing doesn't work at all on that platform.