I am a Pro user. I believe I reported this previously, probably through email, but since the problem has not yet been addressed, I will describe the problem again. See attached images.
When Bitsum released a version that added the button Insights, added the search box, and changed View Log tab to a button, it changed this area from a Windows managed tab control to an program developer managed area with buttons and an input field. Resizing the width of the window below a certain point causes the buttons, graphs, and the edit control to move and overlap, and to generally look very bad, eventually becoming unusable. The search box is lost and the Hide graph button rides over the upper tab bar--and the % CPU and RAM Load areas crush and ride over the Performance graph.
This issue could be handled in very few lines of code by sizing the buttons to the length required to view their captions and by setting the window tracking sizes using the windows WM_GETMINMAXINFO message to prevent crushing together the controls below usability. These minimum changes would make your UI behave in a polished manner.
Ideally, I would suggest redesigning the UI. How about the following?
- Remove the buttons.
- Add a left-justified three button toolbar below the menu and above the performance pane, replacing the buttons. (The toolbar button messages will fire the handlers on the replaced buttons.)
- Move the search box above the status bar and below the Actions Log tab content, and left-justify it also.
- Use WM_MINMAXINFO to make a greatly reduced width that prevents % CPU and RAM Load from riding completely over the performance pane.
You could ask "Why would a user even think of crushing the interface together. Just maximize the thing?" I have four monitors, and even with this, I can only allocate a small area for PL while developing code, testing product, and viewing documentation. By rearrange columns, I can see what I need in PL even with it made smaller.
Please fix this.Regards,
-Robert
Images:
The Good.png - Shows the minimum tracking size (width) that looks good.
the bad.png - Shows the interface somewhat crushed to illustrate what is going wrong.
and the ugly.png - Shows the interface rendered useless.
This is something I do intend to address, I just haven't got to it yet.
The most simple solution will be to enforce a minimum UI size, which you may not like. The better solution, the one I'll use, will be to hide certain controls before they overlap. I'll try to go ahead and get to this soon. I've been aware of it a long time, even before your email, but since it's just as a cosmetic annoyance, I put it off. Life as a microISV is always one of pragmatism. It's hard to wear so many hats.
I'll consider your other suggestions as well. The UI will be replaced entirely at some point, though it's a lot of work, so I'll be working my way to it.
I've improved the situation in v6.7.1.17 beta, which I'll be uploading in a few hours.
There's lots of UI work to be done, but - again - my focus is on replacing the entire UI more so than maintaining this legacy UI, which is now more than 10 years old. I hope to have this done in Q1 of 2015. I've got a lot of work accomplished in Q4 2014, including the new Insights module and a lot of product refinement. All this work has been done in such a way as to be reusable in the new UI.
I appreciate you providing the impetus to get me to work on this. It definitely should have been corrected a while back.
running 7.2.1.7b , maybe let the search box get shortened too a bit .
Yes, that's a good call. There's no reason for it to be as wide as it is. Will do