Forums Feature Suggestions Improved Dialogs (Compilation)

Ok, I've decided to put together a compilation of some different dialog improvement requests from various people here so that it's all in one topic. Please feel free to add more suggestions to this thread for dialogs. Hopefully some of it will be added at some point. Keep in mind that these are not all my suggestions and many of them have already been discussed in other topics that I'm pulling them from. And, yes, DCX and other DLLs can do much of this. There is no need to point that out. These are just suggestions people have for what they'd like built into mIRC's dialog options rather than having to rely on DLLs to do it.

genius_at_work

• A "number choice" box with an up/down arrow:
  http://www.nextedgetech.com/en/products/wSNMPTrap/docs_en/images/monitoring.GIF
  > Properties: "numbers" "letters" "hex" "alphanum" "custom"
  > Properties: minimum and maximum
  > The "custom" choices would be managed like a standard list (/did -raid)
• Another style of scrollbar: http://www.kogeo.de/img/3dmaterial_dialog.jpg
• A color choice dialog. The standard color dialog that shows up with ctrl+k.
• Buttons with images instead of text.
• Picture window box. Basically a box where normal picture window commands can be executed.

hixxy

• The list/edit controls could be updated to support BURK codes.. in fact most of the controls could.. text, box, etc.
• List/edit boxes could support more events; hscoll, vscroll. Dialogs and list/edit boxes could support file drag events (when you drag/drop a file onto them) < these are relatively easy to add.
• More properties, for example we could have a $did() property to retrieve the first and last visible items in a listbox.
• Adding, deleting and positioning controls on the fly.
• Updating control styles on the fly.

RRX

• Dialog control list should support tabs so that mIRC can provide column alignment in native code
• Dialog IDs should allow text rather than just numbers

Riamus2

• Allow full font control in dialogs (font type, color, size, bold/underline/italic, etc)- This would also help for unicode support.
  > These can be set up similar to how they work in picture windows.
• Tooltips (not traytips) that pop up over items in a dialog to offer help.
• A Richedit dialog control.
• Allow dialog controls to be set up on multiple tabs rather than ALL or NONE. Sometimes you want the same control ID on 2 or 3 tabs, but not all of them. Currently, this means duplicating code and using multiple IDs.
• Allow edit boxes to support an "Enter" style that will do something specific when someone hits Enter. Currently, if you want support for that, you need to use a button that is set to default. That's okay, but an Enter style that only triggers if the cursor is in the edit box that uses it would make things easier. This would require a new on DIALOG event of ENTER that can check the $did and do what the user wants.
• Popups in dialogs.
  > These should probably only be allowed to be set up from within the dialog. Otherwise, you'll end up having lots of popup items from other dialogs all in one list, which wouldn't make sense.

I may add more later when I've had time to think about it more. In the meantime, feel free to add all other dialog suggestions that you have.

ID name support would be nice too.

I believe that's what RRX was requesting... text in addition to numbers for IDs.

Ah yes, I missed it. Sorry.

For the time being...

That really doesn't solve much as you still are stuck with using numbers... if two "named" IDs both return "1", they will conflict even though the names vary. Sure, it can make it easier to see what is what, but having a hundred aliases just to return numbers is rather pointless. Still, it is a workaround that is somewhat helpful for knowing what ID is what. Kudos for that.

Aye it's not perfect, but it's definitely more useful than having to go and dig through your dialog code every time you need to refer to a button because you can't remember the ID.

I'd like to see tree view and report styles. (I didn't see them in the list ... at least I don't think I did. ;o)

i requested tree view control 5 years ago and still nothing -_-

progress-bar would be nice too

Not trying to be annoying, but... do you really think that a progress-bar is that essential?

nothing regarding scripting is essential to mirc as IRC client
and yet you still have it...

Yeah, these are suggestions of features people would like. They don't really have to be "essential." As I said, most of these things can already be done using DLLs, so they aren't really essential anyhow. That doesn't make the suggestions invalid.

not to act like a smart allec or anything, but the up down number button is called a spin bar and the scrolly thing is called a track bar, and the edit boxes with colors,etc. are rich edit boxes.(allow for emoticons also)
Also, progress bars would be nice and maybe a checks list box

check boxes in lists are available, if that's what you mean by "checks list box".. radio buttons are also an option

The windows API calls them "up down controls", not spin bars.

In what way does that matter? genius_at_work's description made it clear what he was requesting, so what's the difference what he called it?

im not saying it does..

Just have mIRC include DCX by default

That would be bad for mIRC to do. DCX is updated frequently (much more often than mIRC). If mIRC included it, you'd almost always have an outdated DCX in mIRC and that wouldn't be good. It also means that if the authors of DCX stopped keeping it up to date, Khaled would have to take over or else drop all of the DCX features from mIRC. Neither would be a good thing. Including everything from DCX in mIRC natively would be fine, but including DCX itself wouldn't be good.

I was merely joking Riamus2