How does Phoenix compare to the other form designers available for PowerBASIC?

[Dominic Mitchell]

 
Well, it is more advanced than any of the others.   It is designed with the primary goal of making the design of very complex GUIs easy.  As a result, it has extensive support for control embedding.  This is why the design of a GUI of the type in your question is not only relatively easy to do in Phoenix but is also WYSIWYG. 

The WYSIWYG features are unmatched.  For example, menu design is not done via a listbox or treeview.




The form designer has unlimited undo/redo, a feature that none of the others have.

It has a layout manager that allows the design of fully resizeable windows with no coding required by the programmer.  This feature is not present in any of the other designers.

Seamless support for ActiveX controls.  Just drop the ActiveX control on a form and start coding.  This ease of use is unmatched by any of the other designers with ActiveX support.
Another feature of ActiveX support in Phoenix, is the ability to associate an ActiveX control with another ActiveX control at design-time.  For example, a toolbar with an imagelist.  This cannot be done at design-time with the other designers because their containers are ATL-based.




The ability to design and test custom controls.  This feature is not present in the other designers.  For example the new code editor for Phoenix as seen in the  designer.



The new code editor as seen after the Build and Execute command is selected.



The support for default button handling in Phoenix is superb, and is similar to that provided by the Windows Dialogbox Manager.  This is something DDT fails miserably at.  Sending IDOK is not how one handles default buttons(unless the damn identifier is IDOK).  Yet another feature you don't get with the other designers.

The code generated by Pheonix is not proprietary.  You are free to use the code anyway you like.  It is modelled after the C code samples in Programming Windows 95 by Charles Petzold.  Phoenix comes with a built-in editor,  but any editor can be used to edit the code.

One area where Phoenix is lacking is the support for wrappers.  That stems from the fact that I dislike anything that turns SendMessage into a function call.  The next version of Phoenix will support more wrappers.

[Theo Gottwald]

And here is the link, where you can get Phoenix Visual Form Designer and Code Generator.
Phoenix 2 - Ordering - click here.

The engine for wrappers, and some of them are already there:



just needs to be completed, or let me say it with Jose (talking about DDT-Wrappers in general)
"You can do several hundred of them in very short time." :-).

This picture shows that for example "Resolution Indespendence" is just a click.


And here is a big picture, showing acceptable working resolution (without the second monitor :-).