Many newly added widgets don’t have a visible border (plus other way of identifying themselves) and that is a source of confusion for anybody building entity screens for the first time and even experienced developers at times.
Some minor widget upgrades would make a huge difference to the designer UX.
Currently, you need to know from personal experience that some newly added widgets are INVISIBLE and positioned somewhere near the top left corner of the ES. So we need to randomly click around that area to select it.
When selected, the widget becomes visible by showing it’s sizing handles.
One easy way to improve the ES design mode UX would be to automatically SELECT the newly added widget. That way it will become visible immediately and also ready to work on.
This is an example of how some small upgrades to widgets could have a large affect on user acceptance of the product.
Ideally, a newly added widget should have default properties which indicates it’s newness and in that “new, not yet configured mode” it would identify itself. But i understand … that could be lot of logic to implement. But maybe it would be fairly easy to apply a bunch of default properties to new widgets for designer convenience. Even better, you could add a feature “Save settings as defaults”
My current workaround is to have a few screens containing many model widgets already styled according to my ES “theme”. So instead of adding virgin widgets, I nearly always copy and paste an existing or model widget to the new screen.
A good simple default for virgin HTML widget would be to pre-define the URL pointing to a standard local file such as
file:///C:\Program Files (x86)\SambaPOS5\defaultHTMLwidget.html
or for lazy fix, set the default to: https://www.google.com/
The Editor Widget could have a default Local Setting called “Remove or change me! Default Local Setting for Editor Widget” or whatever and that Local Setting could be initiialized to contain some suitable visible text such as “New Text Editor” or maybe something shorter such as “Text”.
Currently, a new Entity Button has a default caption “00”.
It would be better to set the default caption to “New Entity Button”.
Currently, a new Entity Grid is invisible and also difficult to select (need to draw around the upper left corner of ES, and if you’re lucky you’ll find it). Perhaps set a default Entity Type = Tables with appropriate other settings to make it show?
Other widget types should be made to show by setting useful default settings.