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Make application interface to modern look
Message
From
07/08/2019 10:15:33
 
General information
Forum:
Visual FoxPro
Category:
Forms & Form designer
Miscellaneous
Thread ID:
01669940
Message ID:
01669949
Views:
94
>Hi,
>I received a message from a customer (from Europe) asking if I could make the application (VFP 9) to change the style of the user interface to a modern look. Of course, I will ask him to qualify what he means by the "modern look." I was wondering, have you had these type of requests and how you make the VFP 9 app to have the style and user interface of a modern look. And what is, specifically, a modern look? Any examples?

One thing I've done customers like is to replace my command buttons with a Label that changes the mouse pointer to a hand icon, and draws it with an underline so it looks like a hyperlink. It also hot tracks so when the mouse enters the button square / rectangle, it changes the backcolor to be a highlighted version of whatever the normal backcolor is, so it gives visual cues. Little things like that make a huge difference for customers.

Other things are to create custom classes that draw custom controls (like checkboxes that use images for each state.

Set fonts to use something other than Arial. Segoe UI is a common one people like to see. You can do that generically by going through your VCX files and doing a STUFF() looking for "Arial" and replacing it with "Segoe UI".

Changing icons can be a big thing.

Changing button colors to not be RGB(240,240,240), but rather give it a color theme and add some base class startup code to auto-apply the user-selected theme.

You can insert images behind controls on the form so it looks like it's a skinned surface.

You can actually skin the whole surface, and then add transparent shape controls to intercept mouse events on things like buttons, and then have them control which images appear underneath the shape control, so that there's one for neutral, one for over, one for mouse down, one for busy, and one for disabled.

An entire graphical UI can be created that way, and one which scales up and down based on form resize using basic windows abilities, with the transparent shape controls and other controls auto-resizing as well, adjusting their font sizes as it applicable, etc.

Lots of ways to make it look modern. Marco's suggestion is a good one.
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