Subtitles of the Movie

Before we start covering how to create this wonderful interface we're showing here, how to put the pieces into place and how to work with them, we want to talk about something that's even more important to start with, which is screen resolution, or screen real estate or screen size; whatever you want to call it, but it really boils down to screen resolution. You only have so much real estate on your screen. Right now, for this video, this tutorial, we're working with 800 x 600 and there are other resolutions, though. It has nothing to do really with the size of the screen you have. It has to do with the resolution and everybody wants to run a different resolution. You'll probably find a commonality at your work, but you'll find out that some people don't mind having the text smaller so they'll set it at a higher resolution so they can get more pixels per screen. So in other words, the text will be smaller, the graphics will be smaller. Then other people maybe have a little bit more difficult time seeing the information so they'll want it at a lower resolution. Uh, let's say like 640 x 480 so everything's bigger. But that reduces how much space you have on the screen here. So what you need to do before you ever start designing your interface, is check everyone's resolution at work. You need to find out the lowest common denominator and so you may find out it's 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 or 1024 x 768. You want to find out what's going to work with everybody so your solution will not have scroll bars. It's very important that you don't have scroll bars and people will miss the information or become confused or it just really looks unprofessional. So let me simulate that. Let's say that your screen was only this big. You'd have scroll bars here and you might cut off something that people could see and it would certainly make it difficult to work with it. It's alright on the list view, but on a form view, you don't want to have this. You want to be able to maximize your screen, so you want to design your interface to fit that resolution. So you want to figure out what the lowest common denominator is. Now, if you're a commercial developer, it's a whole different story. You have to decide on what screen resolution I want to work with. Most people these days have at least 800 x 600, if not 1024 x 768, if not even higher. But ten years ago, uh, most people were just getting into the 800 x 600 or had 640 x 480, so when you release that product, you have to make a decision; how much screen real estate do I need? If I need a lot, what's the highest I can go with so the most number of people can use my solution? Because you don't want to have to design several layouts for every screen resolution. That would be very difficult. And even the new feature of resizing of objects that you have in FileMaker 9 does do a great job, but it's not perfect. So you don't want to have to rely on that. Your best bet is to really figure out what screen resolution you want to work with and then make it so that you can see how this solution fits perfectly on 800 x 600 here. So if you're a commercial developer, you need to decide what that is and that'll be one of your requirements to use this solution. Now, if you can go smaller, you go smaller. But if you need more space, like in this invoicing solution, we've chose 800 x 600, even though most people are using 1024 x 768 these days. So it's an involved discussion and there's a lot of decision making to go on to decide what you're going to work with. Now, it's not just what you can see here. There are other elements and we've covered some of them already. For instance, do you want to take up space with the toolbars, or if you remember correctly, in the previous tutorial, the beginner, we turned off the toolbars through a script maker. We'll take a quick look at that. This is not the actual script we wrote, but we'll take a look at it and you'll see we have allow toolbars off. That's the same step we use in our open script on our contact manager. Ok? That says that the toolbars will not be showing and that gives us a lot of extra space and does allow somebody to turn it on. And we also hid the status area. You can see how much unused space there is. Well, if we go back to that script and look at it, we see we do the same thing inside here. If we go down and look for it, we'll eventually see it. It is inside this subscript right here, lock, zoom, hide. That's because we use it quite a few times throughout the whole solution and you'll see in here that we have, if it's the developer, show it, if it's not, lock it and hide it. And what that does is on open of the solution, it hides and even locks this little area right here so we have a lot more space here. And we do that through file options. Under the file name we choose file options, say run the script on open. So that's exactly what we did with our contact manager. We did the same thing. We had an open script. We wrote this and we'll take a look at it real quickly and it does quite a few things, but you'll see allow toolbars off and show hide status area. And then we, of course, adjusted the window to resize to fit that size window and when you run that adjust window resize to fit, it adjusts to the last object on the right, which happens to be this little text block here with our calculation in it and then the last part down. So that's the footer in this case. So if I make it bigger and click the screen button, it's the same thing as adjusting the window resize to fit. And you'll see that it goes right to those parameters. Now, windows doesn't have the screen button, but it still has the same script step and you can use it to your benefit to size the window to exactly the size of your layout. And that's exactly what we've done on the invoicing solution seen behind it.