I am having difficulty modifying the appearance of panels using Pronto Edit. Can someone explain how to work with "parent", "first sibling", "move to front","move to back", etc?

There is not much to them really. You can access the features you mention by using the "Panel" menu, by right-clicking on an open panel, or by using the keyboard shortcuts indicated by those menus. Some of those features are in the "Select" submenu.

"Move to front" and "Move to back" change the order overlapping buttons/frames are displayed. "Parent" and "first sibling" navigate a panel's button/frame hierarchy. Basically, a frame can contain buttons/frames which are referred to as its children, and it as their parent. Buttons/frames who have the same parent (i.e. are in the same frame) are referred to as siblings.

Usually it is easier to just click on a button/frame to select it. Sometimes you may find that the cursor changes to four-way "move" arrows and you can't select anything. This happens if you have selected a button/frame that fills the entire panel, such as a background frame. When this happens it is useful to be able to select either a sibling or a child.

Note that in my opinion, ProntoEdit should not have this problem at all. Most good drawing programs, for example, allow you to select overlapping components simply by clicking multiple times.

Have fun,
Mike

Thanks for the help Mike. I assume, from what you say, that it is possible for a panel to have more than one parent. If so, how do you sort between parents?

Panels don't have parents in the above sense. Though, of course, each panel belongs to a device.

Steve, to keep it simple: Each panel has one or more child frames and buttons. Frames themselves can also hold child frames and buttons. Nothing has more than one parent.

The advantage of this structure is that any frame (together with all of its child objects) can be moved as a single entity.