If you’ve been building layouts for WebDirect you’ve likely seen that WebDirect may draw your objects before conditional formatting or hiding are applied. This never happens in the desktop, where rendering is now double buffered on both Mac and Windows, but it happens frequently in WebDirect. The video below shows this in action and suggests one technique to make it less obvious.
The movie is taken from optimizing our Pro Calendar for WebDirect. We’re also rewriting SeedCode Complete for WebDirect: more on that soon.
[ba-youtubeflex videoid=”5nUQhg8elSg”]
Again, the idea here is to make the “natural state” of the object–it’s appearance before conditional formatting and hiding have been applied–as invisible as possible. In this case, by making the font color of our arrows white.
Here’s part one of this article: “Do as Little as Possible.”
4 Comments
You’ve mentioned a new version of SeedCode Complete at the beginning of the post.
Could you please give us a hint, when the new version will be released?
Hey Marco, can’t get any more specific than “soon”. You should start seeing some preview videos after Pause (http://www.pauseonerror.com) where Jason will be demoing some of the under-the-hood stuff.
Nice tip. Do you know which is rendered first in web direct – conditional formatting or object hiding? I wonder if you may still get a flash if for example CF shows the object and hiding hides it if the order of rendering is natural object state, conditional state, then hidden state.
Thanks, Darren. It looks like conditional state and hidden state are rendered in the same paint operation. So when objects flash (which isn’t all objects) we see…
a) their natural state, then
b) their evaluated state, which takes into account both hiding and conditional formatting.
HTH