A few minor changes have been made to ALD’s interface features in order to make them nicer to look at, and more useful.

In the future ALD will feature several new dialog boxes and to make them look better we have introduced a new checkbox which is based on an icon rather than the older tick box.

We have made this checkbox active by default but it is possible for users to select the old version or the Yes/No buttons. This option is available in the Interface application preferences:

Alongside using icons for check boxes this release also provides a new dialog input mode which uses buttons (and therefore icons) to cycle through options and assign a numeric value to a variable. So, if you want a user to select a dialog option from a range (for example ‘no’, ‘maybe’, ‘yes’) then you can use something like this:

In this example, the variable ‘needTea’ would be populated from a dialog like this:

When the user clicks on the button, it would change to ‘MAYBE’ and the variable would be set to 1, clicking again would change the button to ‘YES’ and the variable would be set to 2. Clicking a third time would return the button to ‘NO’ and set the variable to 0 again.

Another option provided in ALD 12.1.2.0 is the ability to set the font size used in dialog boxes. As screens get larger, it can be beneficial to have larger fonts. This new option, provided in the Application Preferences lets the user select Small, Standard or Large fonts for dialogs:

This option can also be used within custom dialog groups [[tab]], [[vgroup]], [[hgroup]] and [[tabgroup]] by using the option s within the group start, such as [[vgroup s]], to make the children small; and the option l, such as [[tabgroup l]] to size the children large.