FWIW: The MS-Windows "flat" look started in W8 and then continued into W8.1 and on to W10. I do not see this movement towards 2D changing - especially, since Microsoft is really chasing the Apple flat look & feel. I wonder if the best thing might be to remove the PB 3D border feature all together? Thus, enabling (teaching) PB developers how to move their Apps forward GUI wise to meet the newer O/S's standards. Just a thought. ;-)

Thanks for the reply Chris. If there was a hidden setting type of solution to my question, I think you would know, so I and my team will just live with things looking a little screwy in the IDE and getting the 3D look in the compiled applications.



Yes, changing everything to flat because Microsoft says that is best is a possibility, but doing so would be a significant undertaking given the size of our codebase. Another reason we haven't jumped on the 2D bandwagon is that our users prefer that we retain look and feel wherever possible. I understand their feelings. 3D borders are more effective at drawing a user's eyes to the controls than single-line box borders. On phones an tablets where screen pixels are at a premium, 2D borders make sense, but our use of PB is for in-house application development where everybody has big, hi-res monitors such that there is no penalty for wasting 4 pixels per control to render 3D.



For me, I would hate to see a future version of PB force the flat look on us. One of the things that is generally nice about PB is that it is usually not subject to the whims of Microsoft. Although along these lines, one curious omission that I see is that buttons in DataWindow objects do not have a FlatStyle option in the way that the standard command buttons do. So even if we were to drink the Microsoft KoolAid and change everything to FlatStyle, any DataWindow buttons would still be 3D in the painters.

Hi Andrew;

You are certainly welcome to open a Support Ticket as an enhancement request for 3D support in the IDE. Sybase only had that option in earlier PB versions when operating under XP. So this would have to be a whole new feature aspect if Appeon decided to enable this on W10 & beyond.

On the other hand, we have heard from gazillions of PB Developers and even App Users over the past decade that, PB Applications "need to look more like MS-Office". So with Microsoft driving a lot what business users see & want, the 2D look & feel of Office and MS-Windows 10 is the current path as far as we can see. So I am not sure how product marketing, sales and even engineering will be receptive wise to your 3D request. However, you never know until you try.

Regards ... Chris