There is a significant mistake in my Macworld review of FileMaker 14, published yesterday.
I spent a fair amount of time getting to know the new navigation layout part and in the process, coming to like it quite a bit. As I said in the review, at first glance, it looks like a duplicate of the header or footer layout part, but it's not. At the end of the relevant paragraph, I wrote this little summary:
The truth is, you will still want to put column field labels (on a list view layout) in a header part, so that they zoom with the body part. (This would apply to footers as well if you put any objects down there that need to stay aligned with the fields in the body part, for example, a summary field.) Remember, half of the point of the nav part is that it does not zoom. If you put your column field labels into a nav part and the user zooms the window in or out, the fields will become misaligned with their labels. In this example, the layout has three columns ('What is it', 'Type' and 'Rating'). The column labels were placed in the nav part and the window was zoomed to 150%:
The moral is: Even if you put your buttons into a nav part, you'll probably want to put your column labels into a header, at least in list layouts.
I spent a fair amount of time getting to know the new navigation layout part and in the process, coming to like it quite a bit. As I said in the review, at first glance, it looks like a duplicate of the header or footer layout part, but it's not. At the end of the relevant paragraph, I wrote this little summary:
I expect that FileMaker 14 developers will soon start using the navigation part for UI widgets like buttons, and will leave headers and footers for printed reports.I thought hard about the new navigation part; but I didn't give quite enough thought to how the old layout parts will and will not be affected by the new one.
The truth is, you will still want to put column field labels (on a list view layout) in a header part, so that they zoom with the body part. (This would apply to footers as well if you put any objects down there that need to stay aligned with the fields in the body part, for example, a summary field.) Remember, half of the point of the nav part is that it does not zoom. If you put your column field labels into a nav part and the user zooms the window in or out, the fields will become misaligned with their labels. In this example, the layout has three columns ('What is it', 'Type' and 'Rating'). The column labels were placed in the nav part and the window was zoomed to 150%:
Solution: Put your buttons into a nav part, but keep the column labels in a header. The header will zoom with the body part and everything will stay properly aligned. |
The moral is: Even if you put your buttons into a nav part, you'll probably want to put your column labels into a header, at least in list layouts.
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