Saturday, June 28, 2008

Resizable Dialogs - Resize Enable Utility

A common complaint among Revit users is the number of dialog boxes which do not allow for resizing. All of the dialog boxes would benefit from this concept, being resizable that is...

David Kingham brought this utility to our attention at AUGI some time ago. It is called Resize Enable, that is provided free via this website, comes in. "RE" hacks its way into the user interface and application programming interface of windows to allow us to resize dialogs that haven't provided a native way to do so.

The following text is an excerpt from the readme file included when you download Resize Enable:

It's a very ugly system hack that sits in your system tray and attempts to make windows that can't usually be resized, resizeable...

This small hack is completely and utterly free and we accept no responsibility if it causes something to misbehave! It -=IS=- a HACK! Theoretically the worst that can happen is that a window's contents will go a little AWOL, but re-opening the window should sort it out....

If you want features added, or fancy contributing a bit of cash to keep us in Beer and Ben&Jerrys, or just want to let us know that you use it, then get in touch...

via email: orm at digitallis dot co dot uk

As nice as this is there are a couple drawbacks. First is that you need to be careful when resizing some dialogs, like the Review Warnings dialog. You have to adjust the size a tiny amount first or else the buttons don't resize properly and you can't see all of them anymore.

The second is that the project browser begins to display a "box-frame" around any view name that doesn't fit in the current width of the browser. This frame also offsets or distorts the display of the name and it makes it a little harder to determine if you have the correct view selected.

Now these setbacks are what happens on my pc and a couple others I've used it on but it is possible that your configuration won't mind? Your "mileage may vary".

3 comments:

David Kingham said...

No props for the guy who found it?? ;) just messin with ya Steve...I actually forgot about this, I need to add it to my startup.

NKramer said...

This works great for Revit, but it tends to crash AutoCAD. If you try to go to options in cad while its running and a few other issues that I cant think of off hand AutoCAD throws an error and closes.

So whenever I use AutoCAD I turn it off, otherwise its quite helpful.

Steve said...

oops, sorry David. I meant to...fixed!