Display settings - Scaling 175% only works partly

[PvD_Sweden]

Hi folks,

As I am currently working from my holiday address with only my laptop, I thought it would be a good idea to change the Windows display settings to scaling 175%. At home I work with a 24 inch screen, but the smaller laptop screen becomes unreadable in the default 100% setting. While this works quite nicely for most applications, Blue Prism decided to only implement it partly: some texts and values will be shown enlarged, some will not. Ahe ones that are enlarged will no longer fit within the border of the field that has not been scaled up. In other words, it's quite hard to work with BP that way. (...which is a kind way of saying it is a mess...)

Luckily, we're still at version 6.10 and will go over to a newer version, probably 7.3, later this summer.

My question is if I can expect to find the newer version 7.3 of BP behave better on the point indicated above or I can expect the same mess or perhaps worse than I have now?

Happy coding!
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Paul
Sweden

[SouravSaha]

Hi @PvD_Sweden,

To answer your question – upgrading to version 7.3 will not resolve the issue, as the behaviour remains the same in Blue Prism.

As a solution, please ensure that the display resolution is set to 100%. Feel free to reply to this thread if you need further details.

If this resolves your query, kindly mark this as the Best Answer.

[PvD_Sweden]

Hi S,

Thx for your swift reply.
No clue what to do now as I'll be limited to work in places where there's a larger screen available. I'm quite disappointed in BP - again. 

Worked with a flashy new and fancy product in the early 90ies, it developed fast and improved with every version. Then the owners decided to cash out and sell to a big company. From there, things went downhill. Less and less updates, less to no new features. Ownership changed hands a few more times in as many years. In short, the product was left to die.

Suddenly, pension sounds tempting...

Hopefully happy coding...
-------------------
Paul
Sweden

[SayeedBinAbdullah]

Hi Paul,

It can be frustrating when a product doesn’t progress as expected, but Blue Prism has been introducing numerous updates, particularly within its Next Generation platform.

For the latest advancements, you can explore Blue Prism’s official documentation, which provides detailed release notes on recent improvements, including enhanced process visibility, streamlined monitoring, and improved environment management.

https://docs.blueprism.com/en-US/bundle/next-generation/page/release-notes/releases.htm 

Additionally, Blue Prism University offers valuable resources, including FAQs and learning materials, to help you stay informed and adapt to these changes.

https://university.blueprism.com/resources 

Hopefully, these updates bring renewed excitement to your automation journey!

Best Regards,

Sayeed Bin Abdullah

[PvD_Sweden]

Hi Sayeed,

While all of that sounds nice, it is frustrating to work with BP, which was developed as a Windows application but is not adhering to basic Windows standards, the sizing being only one of them.

We're in the middle of an upgrade to 7.3 and much to my surprise some of the things that have been pointed out to BP years ago are still not covered/fixed. A simple thing as cancelling a calculation stage dialogue does still require a click of the cancel button, whereas on the next window the escape button will work just fine. Not being able to get the columns I'd like to see in various panels, BP never remembering where I want to have a panel I use all the time, not being able to make a text box larger while I can make the window it is in larger.

Yes, some things are fixed, I can now search in the environment variable list, but the escape thingy mentioned above still requires me to click instead of escape. Surely there's probably a lot of progress being made, but wherever it is, it ain't in the UI. 

In my view, the BP UI was very nice when I started with it, but since progressed via nice to tedious. It seems all focus is on the tech side of things, while totally ignoring the UI. In the early days, I'd leave a 5-star outa 5  review. Today, I'd struggle to get at 3, and probably end up with 2 starts.

In those same early days I churned out close to a hundred improvement suggestions, most having to do with the UI and to make life simpler for the developer. The only one I saw implemented was the search capability in Studio that was sent by by so many that it could no longer be ignored. But it was only implemented there, it was not implemented in Control Room - and still isn't in BP 7.3.

While working whit RPA development is still nice, doing so in BP has lost all its glamour. As a result of the above, I haven't added an improvement proposal in years, and visit the community a few times per year rather than on a daily basis as I did before. I work with BP because it's what we've got, and I have no illusions on the UI of the product being improved. Ask me again next year, and I'll give BP a solid 1-star outa 5 rating, this one star most likely out of pity. 

Having been in IT development for 35 years and BP since 2017, I've seen many products come - and go. Some where great in the beginning, worked their way up, and got sold to big-money companies. Or perhaps we should call it put out to greener pastures, as development stopped and the product died. Others kept up the good work and thrived*. I still use some of these last category happily on a daily basis. By the looks of it, unfortunately, BP seems to have chosen to be in the first category: the one with the greener pastures.

Happy coding!
-------------------
Paul
Sweden

*A good example is IBM with their programming language RPG. The language was developed in the late 50-ies, kept alive but steadily improved until the 90-ies, only to finally come up with the latest radically improved dialect RPG /free which is a joy to work with. While I don't fancy the earlier dialects much, I do very much appreciate the current version and its development tools. 
Read more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RPG

[Michael_S]

Hey @PvD_Sweden, 

Appreciate the feedback, I can see why you're frustrated, and I'll send it on to the product team for Blue Prism Enterprise. I can't imagine you're the only one who uses Windows' scaling at rates higher that 100%, and we've been having discussions about better accessibility, so it's a timely comment. Sorry I can't help you in the short term, it seems the only answer for now is to revert to 100% scaling. 

[PvD_Sweden]

I get it that you gotta keep up with new tech implementation. But you should have two teams, one tackling tech, the other implementing customer input - with mandatory visible improvements for every release. That way, we the users would fell actual progress as opposed to what we've had for the last too many years. As said, working on BP 6.10 to 7.3 migration now - no clue why as there are no real improvements from my point of view. 
Will be working off-grid for a month shortly, really not looking forward to doing a lot of BP work on the 100% laptop screen.

[david.l.morris]

The best that I've found to deal with scaling issues is to mess around with the order in which I change the scaling. This is not a great solution, but I wanted to suggest it anyway. I cannot remember exactly the order I did these things in, but I think you'll be able to figure it out with some trial and error.

Basically, if I remember right, I'd have the scaling set one way in Windows by default and then log out and log back in. And then I'd launch Blue Prism and then change the scaling back the other way. What this resulted in was Blue Prism mostly working okay with the scaling, but this only lasted until the next logout and log back in. The important thing I do remember was that Blue Prism needed to be open with one scaling and then you change the scaling which causes the desktop and Blue Prism to essentially be at different scalings. Pretty annoying, for sure, especially on laptops.