Flashing layouts on PC

[Wickerman]

Hi - I do my Filemaker developing on a Mac but am doing a project for a person to use on a PC laptop. I've done some reading about differences in behavior on the two platforms but am finding that while my layout transitions on my Mac are rock-steady, we get a massive "flashing" of the whole screen on the PC. It doesn't seem to me that my layout is so larded with graphics that there shoudl be a problem.

I have a gradient rectangle across the top that I copied, 2-px wide, from my graphics program and then "stretched using the object tool in FMP. There's a simple colored rectangle along the left, made in FMP. The buttons I drew in FMP except the List/Form buttons at upper right. There's a small graphic pasted in at the upper left corner, but it's not very big. The blues and yellow I am using are 'custom' colors - does that slow things down?

From looking at this picture can anyone suggest what might be making things so slow for the PC? I'm also wondering whether the laptop in question is just exceedingly slow -- but that's sort of beside the point, since that's what the client is using. . .

Thanks for any pointers.

Albert

Edited December 16, 2008 by Guest

[Ted S]

Albert,

To quote one of our recent presidents "I feel your pain."

I'm on Windows only and Filemaker is by far that flashiest program that I've ever seen -- and not flashy in the good sense of the word. One often gets the feeling that they're at a Paris Hilton press conference when using Filemaker.

Why the folks at FMI can't eliminate this problem is a mystery to me. I suspect that it has something to do with the cross platform nature of FM but that is just a pure guess. All I can say is you will become more accustomed to the flashing as time goes on but I can remember as a new user it got to flashing so much that you think something is wrong and it is about to crash.

Laretta has provided some good tips on reducing the flashbulb effect in some of her past posts. Here's one:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/168605/post/170683/hl/flash/fromsearch/1/#170683

[Joe King]

Okay, this is no so much of a fix as a workaround, but I had a cross platform solution that the client complained about the flashing on the PC. There where sever scripts (inlcuding my primary naviagation script) which flashed the layout numerous times.

My solution was to fade the screen with the tranperency function from the MonkeyBread plug-in and then restore i once the script was complete.

Actually I used several calls to the plug-in so it faded in and then faded out.

This method could also be done with adjusting the window size, but I thought the fade looked better and more 'Vista' like. Basically, I drop to 25% when FileMaker is 'thinking'....

Technically there is still the flashing issue, but without the extremes in color it's not as noticable...

[Josh Ormond]

You may want to try changing the "Hardware Acceleration" on the PC. It is located in Display Properties / Settings / Advanced / Troubleshoot. Keep turning it down until the flashing mostly goes away. Couple this with Laretta's suggestions and the flashing should be dramatically less noticeable.

It is a known issue with Windows and its ability to redraw the screen.