aesthetics

How to find good looking font color if background color is known?

There seem to be so many color wheel, color picker, and color matcher web apps out there, where you give one color and the they'll find a couple of other colors that will create a harmonic layout when being used in combination. However most of them focus on background colors only and any text printed on each background color (if text is ...

How can I enhance the aesthetics of an ugly windows form packed with too many (necessary) features?

One of the window dialog of a software I'm working on looks a bit like this : (original screen-shot copied from this coding horror post, other examples available on this SO question) The thing is that none of the options can be removed (those who can have already been), and that they must all be visible at a glance (i.e. no tabs allow...

What creates the three close/minimize/maximize icons in the top corner of a window? (C++)

I am making a C++/Windows/DirectX program, and when it runs in windowed mode (using d3dpp.Windowed = (!FULLSCREEN); where FULLSCREEN is defined as 0), the three icons that are usually at the top of any window (minimize, maximize/restore, and close) are not there. Also, it's not like just an image with no border or anything, it looks ...

Choosing colour schemes

How do you choose your colour schemes for your applications and/or web designs? Is it a gut instinct thing or can logic be applied here too? I have looked at some colour theory but my combinations seemed wrong. I am looking at a monochrome webpage. Rather than pluck colours out of the air as usual I would like to see if there is a sc...

Aesthetically pleasing GUI components

I want to make my GUI components aesthetically pleasing. Is there any particular ratio I should use between a component's width and height that would make it look especially pleasing? ...

Retyping password to confirm...necessary or excessive?

Simple question...I've noticed several large sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc) have ditched the idea of requiring new registrants to confirm their new password by typing it again. Balancing usability and error-prevention effectiveness...is it better to require confirmation or not? ...

Databound controls "flashing" as they are refreshed

It's a small thing but I was just wondering... Visual Studio 2008, C#. I have a master-detail form with databound controls. When user selects the record in a listbox, all the details are updated in multiple databound controls on the form. As it happens, they kind of 'flash', or blink, when repopulated with new data and it's sort of li...

Is there a way to make a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) Button look like a HTML Hyperlink?

I plan on appending some comments onto a text, to do that, first, I need the concerned text to act like a button for me to launch a popup, which in turn shows the comment. For that to happen, I need to make that concerned text to act like a button in GWT, but due to some aesthetic reasons I don't want it to look like a normal GWT Button,...

What is the best way to use whitespace while programming?

I'm fairly new to programming and from learning I have seen different ways of formatting code, comments, etc; and have been recommended on different techniques. I mostly program in C#, C++, and Java so I want to know what is the the best way to layout code so that if other people where to go through it, they would be impressed by how si...

Long constructor initialization lists

How do you deal with them? I have some classes (usually classes that hold stats etc.) with some 20+ variable members, and the initialization lists end up very long, extending beyond the page width if I don't manually wrap around. Do you try and break down such classes or do you deal with this in some other way? It doesn't look very tid...

Ruby (Rails) #inject on hashes - good style?

Inside the Rails code, people tend to use the Enumerable#inject method to create hashes, like this: somme_enum.inject({}) do |hash, element| hash[element.foo] = element.bar hash end While this appears to have become a common idiom, does anyone see an advantage over the "naive" version, which would go like: hash = {} some_enum.ea...

Visually improving emacs

Hey all, I'm looking for a more visually appealing emacs. Is there anything I can do to make it look more aesthetically appealing or more up to date? I understand that its not how it looks but how it functions that counts, but I was wondering if anyone had any success in beautifying emacs. My platforms are Linux and Windows. I'm aware ...

What's the better approach in changing the model's property value in controller

Which approach is more preferrable when changing just a single value in model? Aesthetically-speaking and performance-wise. Looks clean(albeit with the overhead of pushing the entire model again to the View): ModelState.Remove("Name"); guestResponse.Name = "John"; return View(guestResponse); Looks performant: ModelState["Name"] = ne...