thinForm - clunky to use, but a form designer none the less :)

**Petr Schreiber** · 29-01-2012, 17:45

I remastered the thinForm to new standard, that is:

it uses Callback mechanism to process messages
partially eliminated global variables
project file/save to user chosen file
- project file store thinForm version information
form script generation to user chosen file
- also supports Callback event handling
it runs with ThinBASIC 1.8.9.0 out of the box

There is space for improvement (splitting to more files, using property control, ...), but it could serve as point zero for further modifications and tweaks.

thinForm 2.0
This script is simple form editor, able to generate script code for you, as well as store form as project for later fine tuning.

The program is organised to 2 windows:

main window with tools
second window, which is the one being designed

Quick start
To get the idea on the controls, you might try to design your first dialog with text box and button.

Setting up the dialog

to change default text for dialog, you might edit the caption property from "myapp" to for example "How old are you?"
to change the dialog client area, you might fill the width and height property to for example. Try for example 320 and 160.
hit "Set" button to make the changes appear

Adding the textbox

now we might want to add textbox
press "Text" in the lower part of window
fill cspacing to 5, cwidth to 310 and cheight to 20
click the "Add new" button
textbox will appear
you now might want to change its "txt 2" text to "default". Just change the text in caption and hit "Set"

Adding the button

now we might want to add OK button
click on the "Button" button
fill cspacing to 5, cwidth to 310 and cheight to 40
click the "Add new" button
button will appear
you can now change its default text to OK by editing the caption and pressing "Set"
if you want to move the button, just use the "up", "dn", "lt", "rt" buttons to move it up, down, left and right

Switching between the controls and form
As you probably noticed, the current control has orange borders. To change active control for editation, just use the "first", "prev", "next", "last" buttons.

To edit the form properties, hit the "form" button.

Saving the project
Just click the "Save" button, and fill in the name you wish.
This option saves the form for later processing.

Generating the script
When you are comfortable with the dialog look, press the "Gen script" button. You will need to enter name for the script. Once done, stand alone GUI script skeleton with your controls is at your service! You can edit it now with thinAir and finish the program...

Petr

**Chris Boss** · 30-01-2012, 23:39

Thinbasic appears to be in real need of a Visual Designer from what I can tell.

As an independent developer I am not in a position to give anything away for free (wish I could), but I might point out that I am currently offering a previous version of my GUI engine (sold originally for $249) for the obsurdly low price of only $39 for hobby programmers and if any thinbasic developers who use Powerbasic are interested , it may open up some possibilities for building a true Visual Designer for thinbasic (which I can help out with showing you how to use it). My GUI engine tool, for those who don't realize it, is designed so one can build a visual designer. It has its own drag and drop engine, a drag handle control (to impliment drag and drop), a property listbox control and more.

To appreciate what it could offer to the thinbasic community, you can download my DDT (for Powerbasic) freeware Visual Designer which was creating using this GUI engine. The designer does not use a single Windows API call to do what it does. The GUI engine does all the drag and drop.

http://cwsof.com/freeware/ezdlgfre.zip (freeware DDT Designer)

I can contribute some source code for using the GUI engine to help get a Visual Designer up and running quicker.

Let me say that building a visual designer with real drag and drop and things like a property listbox control is not easy and it has been the biggest weakness in a number of independent (free and commercial) programming languages found on the internet. It is the one area which programmers seem to have the hardest time. Often they try to cludge together a designer using the command set of their programming language and fall terribly short.

I have researched the Windows API for years and built a drag and drop engine into my commercial GUI engine just for the purpose of building visual designers.

Thinbasic IMO is one of the best projects I have seen for a freeware programming language and I like that it emulates Powerbasic too.

The one area I have not done anything with though is code editors (most independent developers don't build one from scratch but use one of the freeware code editor libraries available).

I would be willing to provide some personal help in this effort if possible.

If ThinBasic could move forward with an official Visual Designer front end, it could be come one of the best freeware programming languages around. It is already great, but lack of a Visual Designer holds it back a bit.

**SteveOW** · 05-03-2012, 05:09

Hi this is my first post to this impressive forum.

LONGER VERSION

I am a "VB refugee". I have programmed since 1976 (some Fortran, mostly Basic) to support my work and hobbies mainly in the area of geo-science data analysis and physical systems modelling. I have developed a collection of programs in MS Visual Basic running on Windows 2000 on a 3Ghz P4 with 0.5 Mb of Main RAM. (Please dont laugh!! "If it aint broke dont fix it" was my motto). It also has WinXP(SP0) but I havent used that very much. Many factors tell me it is time to upgrade.

So...

A new computer? yes.

A new OS, sadly, yes.

A new Programming Tool - hmmm.
Microsoft say "VB6 is dead so come to VB express it is nice and free". Hmmm. But I have to port my old code and it will not be easy. So I think "if I have to port why not look and see if there is a better solution?". Maybe now is the time to learn C, or Python, maybe go to Linux. I enjoy a little light programming but I do not live to program. I also need to use the programs I write. So I do not want a big learning curve. I want something like VB6. I search the Wikipedia. Oh so many different BASICs. I try a few and then I find thinBasic.
WOW. It downloads easilly. It works first time. I can understand the examples. It has so much going on. I wish I had this ten years ago it would have saved me from VB.

But. There are a few questions I need to consider.

1) I use dashboard-type forms with lots of text boxes in which I display current parameter values. These forms evolve over the years like eternal prototypes. I found this Thread and tried out Petr's UI designer. Actually it can probably do almost everything I need. But I need to think... "if I design a form this year and generate a script and then fill it with lots of my keyboard-typed code...fine...but how will I add new buttons next year? I guess that I can just hand-enter new control definitions into the script. I wont be doing it too much so I personally could probably live without a fancy GUI RE-design capability. And in some ways design by scripting rather than dragging will give me MORE power over the UI (e.g. I can comment my design in a script).

2) I do not see many products out there with an IDE like Visual Studio. Much of its richness I can do without but what I really like is the ability to interact in debug/break mode - e.g. to interrogate at the command line, to evaluate typed-in expressions, to inspect variable values by cursor rolling over them, to poke new values into variables, to even amend code. I dont know about thinBasic/thinAir underlying architecture but I guess that this sort of thing is not easy to implement.

3) I have recently developed a "need for speed". Attached script (Collisions19) shows the sort of ultra-basic physics modelling that I am interested in (elastic spheres, conservation of momentum, different arrangments). I call it BillyBalls for short. The script is my crude hack of a nice demo written by Jordi Valles, Petr Schreiber and Charles Pegge with thinbasic, TBGL and oxygen. I would need to hack it further and make the physics more realistic (event-driven rather than time-constrained as the collider experts say). It seems (from my brief researches) that most of the physics engines out there are for games or glossy animations. There are one or two academic resources about but they involve complex frameworks and large C libraries and I dont do C. The thinBasic + Oxygen partnership looks very interesting to me. I have never "popped a stack" in my life but while studying the oxygen code I found myself looking up assembler notation. Next week I expect will be designing my own chips! (Not). Petr's TGBL demos are very impressive to me. I personally dont need glossy graphics but anything that speeds up my simulation is useful to me. I looked at PythonXY, I'm not too keen on the Python style but they do have some good maths and science libraries e.g. NUMPY which speeds up array processing.

I'd better stop there for now.
I posted on this thread because of the UI stuff, maybe it should go somewhere else?

I'm sorry about the length of this post...

...here is a

SHORTER VERSION

I love your forum.
I love the products on show.
I need to think about thinBasic Form design, debug capabilities and number crunching capabilities.
Any advice would be very welcome.

ATTACHMENT
CollisionsV19

**kryton9** · 05-03-2012, 08:01

I have not used this, but have read good things about it for linux.

Gambas is a free development environment based on a Basic interpreter with object extensions, a bit like Visual Basic™ (but it is NOT a clone !).

http://gambas.sourceforge.net/en/main.html

**Aurel** · 05-03-2012, 08:47

I really don't understand people who need any sort of Visual designer for programming GUI
programs.Probably i am not used to that way of programming.
And i doubt that this way speed up any kind of programming task.
Probably do when you have lot of controls in one window(dialog).

**ErosOlmi** · 05-03-2012, 09:47

--Aurel
I think we can survive without you to understand.
I prefer to have an open mind forum listening to all point of view rather to say "I do not understand you" (with "you" referring to a general you)

--Steve
you have expressed many very good points worth to take into consideration and deeply discuss or just think about.

thinBasic is an interpreter so in terms of speed it will never compare to real compilers. We closed the gap developing many many native functionality in order to write in few (interpreted) lines what other languages need much more code. Than there is Oxygen that that add the power of just in time compiled code to the interpreter (thinBasic). Consider that Oxygen can understand ASM and BASIC syntax so the Oxygen part of your collision example can be much more Basic like

On visual designer, yes I definitely need to think about that.

On the debugger, I think it is quite good but for complex scripts it has no advanced features like changing or executingpart of the code at runtime or changing variable data while debugging

All aspects to think about

**Petr Schreiber** · 05-03-2012, 10:23

Hi Steve,

welcome to the forum. It was very interesting to hear about your background and ideas. Although I was not a big fan of visual designers myself, now I realize they can really speed up the design and generally help to get the job done faster.

Here is the brief quickstart guide to thinBasic debugger:

you launch debugging mode by pressing F8 or clicking the red arrow on the toolbar
use F8 to step line by line
use CTRL + F2 to place break point
use F5 to run to the next breakpoint
you can inspect the variables by clicking them in the lower left part of the debugging window. It is possible to inspect even individual memebers of the variables based on TYPEs and also 1D and 2D arrays using gridview
to abort debugging you need to hit the red button on debuggers toolbar

I had a little issue running your code, because there was minor problem on line 1039 (you can use Ctrl+G in ThinAIR to get there), which confused the Oxygen in the 1.9.0.0 preview version of thinBasic. It was:

end sub O2s_Finish

but it should be (name of sub commeted out):

end sub ' O2s_Finish

I attach the modified version here. Please do not hesitate to create new thread for this your modification! For example here:
TBGL Scripts and Projects
or here:
O2 JIT Compiler / Programs

If you have ideas for new features or if you found an problem, you can report it in the Support section of the website.

Petr

**Aurel** · 05-03-2012, 11:22

--Eros
You get me wrong ,i don't think that is something wrong to use (have) Visual designer at all.

**ErosOlmi** · 05-03-2012, 12:01

Originally Posted by Aurel

--Eros
You get me wrong ,i don't think that is something wrong to use (have) Visual designer at all.

Aurel,

maybe I got it the wrong side but ...
if you say "I do not think a visual designer is needed" I would say nothing because is your idea referred to the object and not to "people". So I will always respect it.
When you refer to "people" clearly referring to the one just posted before, you are "judging" someone. In this case I feel I need to act.

That's why I posted.
Sorry about that but this is my forum and I want it open mind as much as possible.

Ciao
Eros

**SteveOW** · 05-03-2012, 12:56

- - Eros - -

Thankyou for providing this forum. I think your open-minded and friendly style is very good.

- - Everyone - -

Thankyou very much for your feedback, so much and so soon.

I think I should respond individually to avoid one big bloated post.
I will try to shift to other threads where appropriate.
Please bear with me on this, I am new to internet forums in general.