Expanding text boxes, font-sizing, and readability within Clarify
While talking with a customer recently, they were showing off a "feature" that they had implemented. Whenever they added a note to a case, they have some ClearBasic code that automatically uppercases the entire text of the note before saving it to the database. I shuddered. They asked me if we could do this in our DovetailAgent application. I said Yes, we can, but No, I won’t do it. I think he was a bit shocked.
Why won’t I do this? Because that’s coupling your content to its presentation. There’s already been much written on this topic, so I won’t expand on it here.
After I dug into it a bit more with the customer, it turns out that the reason they did this was because the case history is hard to read, and they felt that uppercasing all the text made it easier to read.
OK, I can understand the issue – the readability of the text. But the implementation of the solution is poor.
In a web application (such as DovetailAgent), using stylesheets and built-in features of the browser, this is easy to do.
Although maybe not as easy as a web app (or as robust), Clarify also has mechanisms for handling this.
I’ve been around Clarify for so long, I sometimes forget that these mechanisms aren’t always obvious. But here’s a few Clarify tips:
Expanding Text Boxes
Put your cursor in any text box, press Ctrl + DownArrow, and a new form will popup that will contain the text in an expanded window.
For example, looking at a case:
Put your cursor in the History text box, hold down the Ctrl Key, and press the Down Arrow key. A new window will be displayed with the text:
I find this a very useful feature, and when I used to use the Clarify client regularly, I used this feature all the time.
Adjusting the font-size dynamically
You can also Ctrl-Scroll to adjust the font-size. If I hold down the Ctrl key and Use the Mouse Scroll wheel, you can easily increase/decrease the font-size.
You can make it smaller:
Or much larger:
Adjusting the font via the user preferences
You can also edit the Font itself, its style, and size in the My Preferences form:
Desktop – My Setup – My Preferences
Click on the Application Font and/or the Edit Field Font buttons to open the Font form:
Here’s my case page after changing the font to 14 point Trebuchet MS font:
Much easier to read (on my screen anyway – not sure if the difference is as clear in this post – just trust me on this one – or try it yourself!)
If you notice in the font window, you can also change the font color. Be careful with this, because even though you can change the font color, I don’t know of a way for a user to change the background color of the form. (If anyone does know, please do share!)
So as you can see, there are ways to adjust the presentation of the data without having to alter the content itself. This is a common practice in web development, but also applies in Windows applications as well.
You don’t have as much control as you do in CSS (for example line-height, word-spacing, and letter-spacing), but at least there is some control.
Hope this helps.
