PureBasic Forum

As someone who is new to Purebasic, there appear to be significant limitations in the
application of colour to GUI objects in the Purebasic environment, particularly
for buttons and panel gadgets. In this regard, I find these limitations difficult to
understand and have a few questions....

Am I correct in assuming that everyone uses the Purecolor library because support
for colour in Purebasic itself has significant limitations ?

I am a little confused because the Purecolor author recommends against using
this library wherever possible. It seems to me that it would be difficult to use
Purebasic for any significant development effort without using the Purecolor library.
Am I right in thinking that almost all experienced Purebasic programmers use this
library ?

As a side comment, I find the Purebasic help documentation to be very difficult
to follow for new users. This is mainly because the documentation consistently fails
to adequately define or explain parameters clearly. A good example of this can
be seen when looking at examples depicting the application of colour in Menu and
Gadget items.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Hello Nigel

The Pure Basic Forms Designer is relatively new, so there are a few things that could be better and surely will be in the future. However, it's a great little tool for graphically defining the layout of gadgets on a form, the 'scheme' for want of a better description. It is then a trivial matter to enhance the appearance by editing the code.

On the Windows platform, much of the colourisation of gadgets is dependent on whether or not your forms are to inherit the XP style, which does bring about limitations. However, for buttons, you can use a bitmap to deliver the colour if required ('ButtonImageGadget'). Gadgets such as text boxes ('StringGadget') can be customized with 'SetGadgetColor' and 'SetGadgetFont' etc - it's all in the help pages and could not be easier to code.

http://www.purebasic.com/documentation/gadget/setgadgetcolor.html

Hello IdeasVacuum

Thanks for your comments. It is valuable for new users (like me) to receive feedback from others like yourself
even if it is only to confirm that I am not missing something fundamental.

I had initially tried the visual designer that is included with Purebasic but had since found Pureform
from Gnozal, which (so far) I like better. Pureform appears to have good colour support included, although
this seems to need the Purecolor library which is not recommended by its author (Gnozal).
I assume the recommendation to avoid using Purecolor is because it is not natively supported by
Purebasic and therefore might be a future liability of some sort.

I did not realise that the standard Purebasic visual designer was relatively new. Perhaps this
explains why it has no significant colour support even though this is a surprising deficiency.
It is unfortunate that the native Purebasic colour support is not already built into the
visual design tools.

It had occurred to me that I could use images to colour certain gadgets and your suggestion
confirms that perhaps this would be a better approach instead of using Purecolor. Also the
existence of both Microsoft Vista and Win 7 already made me unlikely to think about using XP
style inheritance.

Thanks again for your valuable guidance. It is much appreciated.