Suggestions for FC10 UI and EEPROM WritePage component

[Brendan]

Apologies for wrapping different topical areas...

FC10 Graphical User Interface:

Although I've suggested elsewhere an ability to colour custom macro icons in the Project Explorer window, it would really help to be able to move them up/down the list (i.e. not just sorted alphabetically).
Working on sizeable projects, often with around 50-100 macros, often means scrolling up/down the list to review or parallel-edit or reference associated/dependent macros/local vars/etc. Although possible to workaround by renaming macro names with leading underscores (etc) to group them at the bottom of the list, or alphanumeric preamble to group them at the top, it would make things much easier to be able to drag them up/down the list, or optionally re-sort alphabetically again if desired.

When working on the flow, hold-drag selecting a large block of icons can take a very long time. It would be nice to be able to click-select the first icon at one end of the block, and then (e.g.) shift+click the icon at the other end of the relevant block to select everything between - much like quick-selecting a large group of cells in Excel, for example.

EEPROM WritePage component function:

I'm using the convenient WritePage function to write 24LC512, though also need to clear pages to zero on occasion, and single page writes to EE buffer should preserve EEPROM endurance. The WritePage function however requires to see an array, requiring workaround by creating a Constant[128] array comprising all zero's to clear all cells to those values, though something like a ClearPage function would be useful - i.e. similar to WritePage, with just the 'Byte[]' array field replaced with 'Byte' in order to specify a common value for all written bytes.


Thanks and best regards,
Brendan

[Steve-Matrix]

Hi Brendan,

Thanks for the suggestions.

Although I've suggested elsewhere an ability to colour custom macro icons in the Project Explorer window, it would really help to be able to move them up/down the list (i.e. not just sorted alphabetically).

This would be tricky to implement, but as a suggestion you could use bookmarks, searches, or the TODO feature to help navigate quickly between key macros.

For example, bookmark the first icon in the macros you are wanting to access often and then navigate to them using the Bookmark tab in the "Icon Lists" panel.

The search tool could also be useful. If you started each macro with a comment that contained a unique term for that macro or group of macros, you could quickly search for that term and use the search result to navigate to the appropriate macro. Or prefix comments with "INDEXER:" or similar and search for that. For example, your search could result in something like this:

indexer comment.png (10.64 KiB) Viewed 3369 times

The "TODO" feature works by auto-searching and listing icons that contain "TODO:" in their comments. You could co-opt this feature to navigate to important macros in a similar way (and these would be listed without needing to search for a term).

When working on the flow, hold-drag selecting a large block of icons can take a very long time. It would be nice to be able to click-select the first icon at one end of the block, and then (e.g.) shift+click the icon at the other end of the relevant block to select everything between - much like quick-selecting a large group of cells in Excel, for example.

Great suggestion. I have implemented this and it will be available in a future core update.

I'm using the convenient WritePage function to write 24LC512, though also need to clear pages to zero on occasion, and single page writes to EE buffer should preserve EEPROM endurance. The WritePage function however requires to see an array, requiring workaround by creating a Constant[128] array comprising all zero's to clear all cells to those values, though something like a ClearPage function would be useful - i.e. similar to WritePage, with just the 'Byte[]' array field replaced with 'Byte' in order to specify a common value for all written bytes.

I'll pass that suggestion on.

[BenR]

Hello,

Regarding the EEPROM suggestion. We could add the function I just wonder how useful it is outside of the use case you're using it for. It might make more sense for you to take the current component source and modify it to suit your needs?

The source is available here if you want to have a go.
https://www.flowcode.co.uk/wiki/index.p ... )_(EEPROM)