Updating form resolution question

[Salad]

What do you do when you've designed an app at 800x600 and you now want
to make use of higher res?. It's an internal app and won't be
distributed to the world.

I'm sometimes asked to squeeze in a new field or two in a form that has
most, if not all, screen real estate in use. I'll mention that the form
is top/bottom/left/right filled in. The person will be looking at the
form in high res and say "We have lots of room to insert it."

I know there was code in the ADH book to resize a form depending on the
res. But that won't increase my real estate on the form.

What have you done in the past if you now want to change all of your
forms to a higher res?

[Rick Brandt]

"Salad" <oi*@vinegar.com> wrote in message news:40***************@vinegar.com...

What do you do when you've designed an app at 800x600 and you now want
to make use of higher res?. It's an internal app and won't be
distributed to the world.

I'm sometimes asked to squeeze in a new field or two in a form that has
most, if not all, screen real estate in use. I'll mention that the form
is top/bottom/left/right filled in. The person will be looking at the
form in high res and say "We have lots of room to insert it."

I know there was code in the ADH book to resize a form depending on the
res. But that won't increase my real estate on the form.

What have you done in the past if you now want to change all of your
forms to a higher res?

I suppose if I had a form where ALL of the users used a higher res then I would
just make the form bigger. Otherwise I do as you are and design to 800 by 600
as a minimum standard. Yes, these forms are smaller on a higher resolution, but
then so is every other application that those people run. Higher res settings
"normally" mean larger displays which means the form should still be readable.

As for the real estate issue you can always use a TabControl or pop-up forms to
provide a bit more flexibility in that regard.
--
I don't check the Email account attached
to this message. Send instead to...
RBrandt at Hunter dot com

[Fletcher Arnold]

"Salad" <oi*@vinegar.com> wrote in message
news:40***************@vinegar.com...

What do you do when you've designed an app at 800x600 and you now want
to make use of higher res?. It's an internal app and won't be
distributed to the world.

I'm sometimes asked to squeeze in a new field or two in a form that has
most, if not all, screen real estate in use. I'll mention that the form
is top/bottom/left/right filled in. The person will be looking at the
form in high res and say "We have lots of room to insert it."

I know there was code in the ADH book to resize a form depending on the
res. But that won't increase my real estate on the form.

What have you done in the past if you now want to change all of your
forms to a higher res?

I think you've hit the nail on the head - the ADH code is of limited value
really. If this app is internal then you may well decide to optimise the
design for 1024 x 768 since you know that none of your users ever use 800 x
600. However, 'optimising the design' may well not mean simply re-sizing
the controls, but radically changing form design to make better use of your
'screen real estate', and, as you can imagine, there is no magic fairy dust
which you can sprinkle over you application to sort that out.
You could consider maintaining 2 sets of forms for different resolutions,
which might offer the best solution for a variety of screen resolutions. I
tried this approach on one database but after a short time, the extra work
of maintaining 2 sets of forms became too much and in the end we agreed that
we should design for 1024 x 768 as a minimum.
There will be a reasonable amount of work, though, if you are going to take
the opportunity to re-design the front-end rather than simply re-size the
controls.

Fletcher

[Salad]

Fletcher Arnold wrote:

"Salad" <oi*@vinegar.com> wrote in message
news:40***************@vinegar.com...

What do you do when you've designed an app at 800x600 and you now want
to make use of higher res?. It's an internal app and won't be
distributed to the world.

I'm sometimes asked to squeeze in a new field or two in a form that has
most, if not all, screen real estate in use. I'll mention that the form
is top/bottom/left/right filled in. The person will be looking at the
form in high res and say "We have lots of room to insert it."

I know there was code in the ADH book to resize a form depending on the
res. But that won't increase my real estate on the form.

What have you done in the past if you now want to change all of your
forms to a higher res?

I think you've hit the nail on the head - the ADH code is of limited value
really. If this app is internal then you may well decide to optimise the
design for 1024 x 768 since you know that none of your users ever use 800 x
600. However, 'optimising the design' may well not mean simply re-sizing
the controls, but radically changing form design to make better use of your
'screen real estate', and, as you can imagine, there is no magic fairy dust
which you can sprinkle over you application to sort that out.
You could consider maintaining 2 sets of forms for different resolutions,
which might offer the best solution for a variety of screen resolutions. I
tried this approach on one database but after a short time, the extra work
of maintaining 2 sets of forms became too much and in the end we agreed that
we should design for 1024 x 768 as a minimum.
There will be a reasonable amount of work, though, if you are going to take
the opportunity to re-design the front-end rather than simply re-size the
controls.

Fletcher

Thanks for the bad news...which I kind of expected. Most of the work I will
simply resize...and in some places reposition....but there are enough controls
to make it a boring task.