Designing Windows › Overall Appearance › Differences Between Design and Target Platforms

Differences Between Design and Target Platforms

Because of differences in hardware and operating systems, applications may look or behave differently on the execution platform than on the design platform. The following points explain some of these differences.

• The size of fonts from platform to platform and the resolution of monitors can cause some overlapping or truncation of controls. These suggestions can help you minimize or eliminate problems caused by different font sizes and monitor resolutions:
  • Size the surrounding box around each control and prompt (the box that you see when you select a control or prompt) larger both horizontally and vertically.
  • Change the font designation of the generated application on the target (execution) platform to match the font designation on the development platform.
  • Position entry fields and their prompts with the Horizontal/Middle alignment option (select Edit, Position).
  • Perform the design work on the lowest resolution monitor on which the application will execute. Controls sized for fonts on a low resolution monitor are usually sized adequately for a high resolution monitor, but not conversely.
• Literals on the Windows platforms always align at the top of their surrounding box. Center Vertically is a property of literals.
• The Navigation Diagram tool supports only 16 color (4-bit) and 256 color (8-bit) bitmaps. Most graphic software packages save bitmap images in at least one of these formats.
• The Designed Position of a window or dialog can vary. Designed Position is a property of a window or a dialog. For applications executing on Windows, the position of the window or dialog at runtime is relative to its designed position on the design desktop. For example, suppose you design a window whose lower left corner is three inches horizontally and three inches vertically from the lower left corner of the design desktop. At runtime, that window will appear three inches horizontally and three inches vertically from the lower left corner of the runtime desktop.
• The behavior of the default push button when the Enter key is pressed varies by platform. On the Windows platform, the Enter key invokes the push button that has the focus regardless of which push button is the default. If the focus is on any other type of control, the Enter key invokes the default push button.