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FEATURE
Often-Used Calculations
Implementing a more elegant interface for common conversions
Issue: 19.5 (September/October 2021)
Author: Markus Winter
Author Bio: Markus is a Molecular Biologist who taught himself REALbasic programming in 2003 to let the computer deal with some exceedingly tedious lab tasks. Some call it lazy, he thinks it smart. He still thinks of himself as an advanced beginner at best.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 30,264
Starting Page Number: 12
Article Number: 19502
Resource File(s):
project19502.zip Updated: 2021-08-31 23:28:57
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
Xojo users often produce specialist software that was clearly written by experts in their respective fields. What Xojo likes to call "Citizen Developers."
But sometimes the interface in these apps isn't quite up to the same level as the functionality of the app. In one word, it's
clunky .Now don't get me wrong. I created the same kind of interfaces at some point myself—I simply didn't know better, and had no time or patience to even think about improving the user experience. So, I completely understand where the authors were coming from—they have a job to do, and looks are not even of secondary importance. But it really can be done more elegantly without much effort.
As I'm the cook in the family and like to try new recipes (that I find on the Internet by simply searching for the list of ingredients I want to use), I often find myself having to convert from Fahrenheit to Celsius and from ounces to grams (see the "The Making of an Article" sidebar).
As an example, I want to show how to do conversions in a nicer way than I sometimes see done. Today we are dealing with some often-used calculations, how you might present those calculations to the user, and how to improve the interface.
The Calculation
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