InstallOptions Designer, Editor, Alternative to HM NIS Edit?
Hello,
HM NIS Edit is a cool little NSIS editor and it is about the only NSIS editor on the market that has a pretty good IO designer. Unfortunately, the IO designer has been plagued with bugs since its first release.
Just curious, does anyone use any third party apps to help them speed the process of IO design? I've got more than several screens and getting everything just right and tight is becoming impossible using HM NIS Edit alone.
No bash on the creator and developer as I think HM NIS Edit has incredible potential and I do use it to help with my boilerplates. In case the owner of HM NIS Edit is reading this, I'd like to mention a few bugs I've found.
All of the following bugs relate to the IO designer
1. Placing a control (i.e. label, textbox) on a form and then changing the state or almost any other option related to that control will get you stuck in the InstallOptions Control box. Getting back to designing the form becomes almost impossible.
Fix. Detach InstallOptions Control from Main Window
2. Grabbing and dragging controls on a form become dangerous the smaller the control. The reason is because controls tend to resize even upon simply clicking on them. This is a constant bug and tends to offset alignments. This also affects big controls.
Fix. Alternative. Launch Windows magnifier for help in grabbing control away from handles.
3. Copying and Pasting a set of controls would leave you to believe the pasted copy should automatically create greater index numbers. This is not the case. It seems when you paste, the original floats up to the front and shifts down to the right. It seems in other words you paste to the back rather than on top of the original control.
Fix. None. No option to shortcut Bring to front OR send to back.
4. Snap to grid is inconsistent. You can take one control and have it snapped where it belongs and yet take another of the exact same specs and it will not snap to the same spot OR align correctly. To test this, just create several of the same controls and align them in a consistent manner.
Fix. Maybe. I've noticed the greater the snap distance the harder to see the mistakes. Yet, I design with 2 to 3 pixel snap and notice it almost constantly.
5. I've noticed this on rare occassions, a manual edit to a controls size or placement will be either overwritten automatically (un-aligning a control) or the manual edits are simply ignored.
Fix. Unknown.
I really enjoy using HM NIS Edit and I hope these bugs get a final address. I think the developer has done awesome in bringing such a tool to NSIS BUT it is about time these bugs get squashed. I've seriously noticed these for a long time. I can blame myself for never informing the developer but this was mainly because I never really used HM NIS Edit except to help create my boilerplates.
Currently, are there any other options for designing an IO file? I would really like to know about them. Thanks!