Tip of the day - Shadow effects on your screens !!!

[Jose Lerebours]

<plug>Have you ever used Laura's "screen painter"?  If not try it!</plug>

The above plug is simply because this tip requires you to use Laura's 
screen painting tool.

While writing a POS application, I decided to give my screens a bit of 
life with colors and
shadows.  In comes the screen painter tool.  I bought this tool in 
Orlando years ago and
never used it until now ... kick, kick, kick myself ...

As we all know, if you intend to use a screen for popup or window like 
partitioned screens,
you must align the screen at the upper left corner (X=0, Y=0).  Armed 
with the screen painter
and this piece of knowledge, I designed my screen (or window) and gave 
it a nice shadow.

I went on to my processing table and "BANG" no shadow ... What 
happened?  Well, I know
that filePro will show from left to right and from top to bottom as far 
as it finds a physical
character - the shadow, may not be a physical character.

A simple solution was to type anything I wanted (I used the graph 
characters and drew lines)
in the areas where I intended to place the shadow.  I then set my COLOR 
to GOLD and
painted over the characters - Of course, I set it so that both 
foreground and background were
of the same color, this way, characters were hidden from user and 
tricked filePro so that I
get the effect I wanted - Here is a window with a black shadow (not sure 
if pasted image will show)



Gold is not a good color for shadow (no depth), but it goes to show that 
you can use any
color on the pallet and customize your screens.

One other advantage to this trick is that you can place your shadow any 
where you want it!

Hope you find this tip useful !!!


-- 

Jose Lerebours
http://www.fpgroups.com
(954) 559-7186
fp at fpgroups.com
fpgroups at gmail.com
PHP & filePro Custom Solution Provider