MLS forced full screen.

Discussions around using and interfacing with the Church MLS program.
alankristensen
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#11

Post by alankristensen »

scgallafent wrote:
joelearl wrote:Update - when I checked my screen resolution, I found it was set to 1024x768, but could go higher. Since I am a resolution junkie, I cranked it up to the max of 1280x1024. And lo, the window was then resizable. So I guess the change mentioned by scgallafent was to the *minimum* size, and when my screen was only that big it could not go any smaller.
You are correct that it sets a minimum window size.

Last week, I noticed that the Send/Receive button is hidden by the Windows XP task bar when running at 1024x768. (Now you know what we're running in my clerk's office.) The window size has been adjusted slightly in MLS 3.7.4 so that the button isn't hidden in that situation.
Well... on the system that I am running, we have a 17" crt and it's resolution is 1024x768, which is what you coded for. Sorry to say that it was a little short sighted.

The coders forgot about the windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen. That takes up space.

Now that your application is set to a minimum of 1024 x 768, it takes up the whole screen and sits behind the toolbar. This covers all the buttons at the bottom of the program, like close, print, print preview, send and receive, etc. What are we to do?

The only option we have is to auto hide the windows taskbar so we can see what is going on. This is going to confuse others using the system, since they will be looking for a toolbar that is not there.

Please consider reducing the minimum size to 1024 x (768 - taskbar height)

Sorry if this seems like a rant on the developers, but if they are developing for a screen resolution of 1024.768, they must remember there are operating system items on the screen that are not easily hidden by the average user.
lajackson
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#12

Post by lajackson »

alankristensen wrote:Now that your application is set to a minimum of 1024 x 768, it takes up the whole screen and sits behind the toolbar. This covers all the buttons at the bottom of the program, like close, print, print preview, send and receive, etc. What are we to do?
The phone started ringing when the new release showed up today. Several of our units have monitors where you cannot access the Print, Print Preview, Close, etc. buttons even if you hide the task bar. Our FM Group has been very frugal, to say the least.

Is there a way to resolve the real estate problem without bringing in personal monitors or moving one larger monitor around between clerks offices and buildings?
russellhltn
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#13

Post by russellhltn »

lajackson wrote:The phone started ringing when the new release showed up today. Several of our units have monitors where you cannot access the Print, Print Preview, Close, etc. buttons even if you hide the task bar.
Is that really a monitor limitation, or has someone changed the resolution? The Dell E773s CRTs we just got rid of which date to 2004 (to the start of the 5-year program) could do 1024 x 768. Our oldest flat screen (made in 2011) does 1280 x 1024.

So is the limitation really the monitor or perhaps wrong video drivers?
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sbradshaw
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#14

Post by sbradshaw »

Do you have Windows 7? If so, you might try this (I haven't tried it):
http://www.tlbhd.com/how-to-get-better- ... book-2772/
Samuel Bradshaw • If you desire to serve God, you are called to the work.
lajackson
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#15

Post by lajackson »

russellhltn wrote:Is that really a monitor limitation, or has someone changed the resolution?
I hadn't thought of resolution, although I don't think so. These are folks with the original 15-inch monitors that were still working just fine until the software overran them today. They usually don't play with the computer settings.
sbradshaw wrote:Do you have Windows 7?
Windows 7? No, but I hear it's coming out any day now. [grin]
russellhltn
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#16

Post by russellhltn »

lajackson wrote:These are folks with the original 15-inch monitors that were still working just fine until the software overran them today.
Not sure when the church was doing 15". We started with 17" CRT in 2004 and I don't think we got any new display devices until 2011. (Only the computers were changed in 2009-2010.) So, clearly we missed a round. But I've seen some cascaded 15" show up at the FHC.

I'd Google the model number and confirm what the native resolution is.
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rmwooten
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#17

Post by rmwooten »

When you make a significant change you should list that change in the release note. I couldn't find this change. When you do this kind of thing you deserve to have your phone ring off the hook! It would be good if you took a sampling of the user community before you do this type of thing to see what effect it will have on the users.
What you did is multiplied across every unit who uses this release. If some of their clerks are near-blind and use the lowest resolution possible, all the clerks (near-blind or not) are stuck with the screen maximized. When they try to size it down it snaps back up to nearly full screen. Then they wonder if the latest release is broken or what. They then waste more time coming onto the forum. Then they find that many clerks feel the same way and they find the developers defending an inconvenient, bad decision on some developer's part and further wasting the clerks time by suggesting they now go in and up the resolution on their screen (which is not a good option for units with nearly-blind clerks). It takes a big man to admit he has made a mistake. It takes an even bigger developer and community moderator to admit we have made a mistake and to correct it to the satisfaction of our user community. There is no shame in this. There is shame in forcing users to live with an admittedly bad decision by default. We shouldn't be talking about changing system resolution or changing monitors because we made an unpopular software change. Unless there is a good technical reason why the minimum size needs to be changed, it should be changed back, or the user should be allowed to select the minimum window size in the system options.
lajackson
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#18

Post by lajackson »

rmwooten wrote:When you do this kind of thing you deserve to have your phone ring off the hook!
It would have been fine if their phone had rung off the hook. It didn't. Mine did, the STS during sacrament meeting, and I have nothing to do with the change. I did not deserve to have my phone ring off the hook.
rmwooten wrote:It takes a big man to admit he has made a mistake. It takes an even bigger developer and community moderator to admit we have made a mistake and to correct it to the satisfaction of our user community.
Keep in mind that community moderators are not developers. They merely moderate this Forum as end users. They do not have anything to do with the coding of the programs. The moderators did not change anything, and do not have the power to change it back.

To their credit, the developers did mention here that they had discovered a problem with the change and would adjust it.
rmwooten wrote:We shouldn't be talking about changing system resolution or changing monitors because we made an unpopular software change.
I think we should discuss almost any means within our power to offset a change that keeps us from doing our work. If changing the resolution temporarily is the only way to run MLS, then change we must. Again, moderators have nothing to do with coding and have run into this problem unexpectedly, just as with every other user.
rmwooten wrote:Unless there is a good technical reason why the minimum size needs to be changed, it should be changed back, or the user should be allowed to select the minimum window size in the system options.
With this, I fully agree.

And you have brought up an excellent point that there are many who change the resolution or window size in order to be able to read the screen in the first place. This recent minimum size change has taken away that capability, as well.

Hopefully, the developers will move us all back to reality sooner, rather than later. But as I said, not even I, as a community moderator, have any influence at all on when that will happen.
rmwooten
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#19

Post by rmwooten »

Thanks for some excellent responses. I'm pretty new to this forum and am not familiar with the inworkings of "who does what" and "how needed changes get any priority". I can see I was mistaken in many of the things I said and I appreciate you taking the time to address my concerns/venting. I did have hopes that this forum was a way of bringing about needed changes in the system, but your last statement seems to removes that hope. Who does decide which problems get addressed? Does anything we write here make any difference, besides communicating that there is a problem to the community? It seems at a point in the posts that this becomes more of an emotional support group - yep, we know there is a problem but we can make it if we will but endure by using workarounds, until someone, somewhere decides we have endured enough.
scgallafent
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Re: MLS forced full screen.

#20

Post by scgallafent »

lajackson wrote:Is there a way to resolve the real estate problem without bringing in personal monitors or moving one larger monitor around between clerks offices and buildings?
The short-term fix is to either kick the resolution up temporarily or hide the task bar to expose that extra space. I would (did in my clerk's office) set the task bar to auto-hide for the next couple of weeks rather than increase the resolution on a small monitor.

The code fix that addresses it is already in MLS 3.7.4, which is expected to start beta testing in about a week. I can talk with the project manager about making it an open beta fairly early in the process so that it can be downloaded as soon as we're comfortable with a widespread release.
alankristensen wrote:The coders forgot about the windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen. That takes up space.
That's not actually what the coders did. What the coders did was take the screen dimensions that were used when MLS was targeting 800x600 and expand the surface areas by exactly 224x168. Based on what we're seeing, the same issue would have occurred with the previous version of MLS when running at 800x600.
alankristensen wrote:Please consider reducing the minimum size to 1024 x (768 - taskbar height)
The window size has been adjusted in MLS 3.7.4 so that the button isn't hidden.
russellhltn wrote:Is that really a monitor limitation, or has someone changed the resolution?
The monitor may be able to scale up to a higher resolution, but that isn't an ideal solution because it reduces text size and could make it difficult to use for some users. From our end, it doesn't matter if the monitor can scale up because -- as it is right now -- it doesn't meet our spec that MLS operate at 1024x768. Scaling up would solve the problem temporarily for the next couple of weeks until the beta starts rolling out.
rmwooten wrote:find the developers defending an inconvenient, bad decision on some developer's part
Nowhere have I defended an "inconvenient, bad decision" regarding this. This post is where I said we had discovered the issue shortly after it was reported here and made a correction in MLS 3.7.4. We have also identified the root cause of the issue and how it slipped through QA and made some adjustments to try to prevent a similar issue from making it through in the future.

Is it a bug? Absolutely. Are we fixing it? Absolutely and, I would argue, fairly quickly. The first forum report regarding the issue was made on September 27 and we'll have a fix out in beta less than 30 days later. (I'm not happy that it's taking that long, but there are other factors that drive that schedule.)
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