I’m just about to finish my next app and due to the ratio of the time spent on it
15% coding
5% looking for workaround of PA limitation and
80% visualization
I have decided to give review here with a solutions which I think would make a significant difference with designing apps in PA. Please fix me if I’m wrong in any point I’ll make here
First of all the time ratio is based on designing apps without using built-in templates or customizing them to our needs. I don’t think to make 100 000 built-in templates to satisfy each user and their apps is the best workaround to this issue and I think it would make just things even worst.
So I was trying to make my own templates based on new abilities in PA.
Create one visual and use the property in other visuals
I have made an item (let’s say a button) and adjust it properties as
Fill Color, Disabled Fill Color, Radiuses (lefttop, leftbottom ,righttop, rightbottom), Border color, disabled border color, border size, focused border size, pressed border color, color, pressed color, hover color
and I tried to link them to my other buttons. So I went to advanced property of each button and went through each property by searching “fill” and typed in Fill - Button1.Fill, and so on until I filled each property I wanted to customize. In this example all 14 of them. To reduce time filling all these property one by one I have tried to copy and paste second button with already filled properties and use it. Problem with that is that it also copied other property which I didn’t want to use like OnSelect, DisplayMode and so on which means I ended up to go through the advance property anyway, delete them and change them to whatever I needed. To fixed that I have even made a “dead” screen where I put all items with only prefilled properties I needed but after few items it just become overcrowded and hard to orientate in them. So at the end I was just inserting the item property one by one from the first item mentioned above which takes some times to go through each one where I was losing a lot of time… Another disadvantage of it is that after a time I simply forgot which property I wanted to link and which property is actually customized and which item is the main one and so on. In another words pain in the “back”
Create static database with all property in it
I have even tried that but gave up on it very quickly. Changing something there or orientate in it was even more time consuming then going through each property one by one
SOLUTION
Solution is I think very simple and already used in every programming interface from visual studio to Xcode.
- Create a full screen and split screen programming mode for Action coding and Design coding. In the programing mode see only property which are customized from selected pre-build templates
- Get rid of the Advance panel which is already overcrowded and totally useless without searching for the property anyway. The programming mode would make ability to access more items properties without overcrowding anything by using IntelliSearch when typing
- Ability to create our own templates for items and for one property (like color) only and link it easily with an item in the programming mode
Before
After
Insn't this better the the overcrowded advance panel ???
