Monthly Archives: March 2011

Clarion 8 – New UI features

Clarion 8 has a number of very important enhancements to the IDE, those have been talked about before, and shown on ClarionLive. Version 8 also has a number of new UI features introduced into the RTL. In no particular order here they are:

Three-state Checkbox controls

Checkbox controls now provide an optional third state.  The CHECK control can offer either two states (ON or OFF) or three states (ON, OFF and INDETERMINATE).
By default, when the CHECK is unchecked (off) the USE variable receives a value of zero (0); when the CHECK is checked (on), the USE variable receives a value of one (1), and when the CHECK is in indeterminate state the USE variable, by default, receives a value of two (2) . The VALUE attribute can be used to change the default ON/OFF values, and set the USE variable to other values. You can also use the runtime properties PROP:TrueValue and PROP:FalseValue.

If the STATE3 attribute is enabled then you have a three-state checkbox.  You can specify the value the USE variable receives in the Designer or at runtime with PROP:State3Value.

Three-State Check controls; Win 7 on the left and XP on the right

Another feature that applies to both CHECK controls and OPTION controls; both now support a ReadOnly property.

Gradient support on Toolbar controls

All of the existing implementation for creating gradients are now supported for Toolbar controls.  You can create much nicer looking Toolbars though I’m make no claims about my artistic ability, I think this looks pretty good:

Gradient support for PANEL and BOX controls

Same here, all of the existing implementation for creating gradients are now supported for BOX and PANEL controls.

PROP:NoTheme

When the Sheet/Tab control was updated to support OS Themes most users were pretty happy, but those who liked to use their own Colors were not as happy. In Clarion 8 we have introduced a strategy that allows your program to be manifested (i,e use the the OS theme), but with Prop:NoTheme applied to a SHEET control, you can set the colors for the SHEET and for individual Tabs.

There is also Global Template support to apply PROP:NoTheme to all Sheet/Tabs in your application.

Slider control

Version 8 introduces support for the SLIDER control.

New RTL implementation for disabled images and icons

In this case the images say it all

Using an Icon image:

Using a JPG image:

As you can see lots of nice UI improvements for your end users.