gui

Ribbon Toolbar and Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1

Today I was listening to the Hanselminutes show about .NET 3.5 SP1...What's inside, and they twice mentioned the Office 2007-like Ribbon control that is included in Visual Studio 2008 Service Pack 1. I am very interested about this, as I was previously looking at purchasing this from a 3rd party vendor (likely DevComponent's DotNetBar...

Visually Tag/Mark a Window

Is there any software tool available which allows us to visually mark/tag a window? I'm not restricting this question to any OS. /* Aside: I once replaced a live production database containing thousands of records with an empty development version simply because the two instances of Enterprise Manager looked exactly the same. */ ...

Should I use a cross-platform GUI-toolkit or rely on the native ones?

On my side job as programmer, I am to write a program in C++ to convert audio files from/to various formats. Probably, this will involve building a simple GUI. Will it be a great effort to build seperate GUIs for Mac and Windows using Cocoa and WinForms instead of a cross-platform toolkit like Qt or GTK? (I will have to maintain a seper...

Google Talk's Graphics Toolkit ?

What graphics toolkit is used for the Window's Google Talk application? ...

Linux GUI development

I have a large GUI project that I'd like to port to Linux. What is the best framework to use for GUI programming in Linux? Should KDE / Gnome frameworks be used? Or can I use something more generic other than X? I feel like if I chose one of Gnome or KDE, I'm closing the market out for a chunk of the Linux market who have chosen one ov...

3rd Party UI components for .net Compact Framework?

I have a .Net compact framework application with a frankly unimpressive UI. My win32 app uses Dev Express components and looks great, but I can't find anything similar for the compact framework. Can anyone recommend components that will jazz up my UI? Does such a thing exist, oram I going to have to owner draw my components or even wo...

Are there any "nice to program" GUI toolkits for Python?

I've played around with GTK, TK, wxPython, Cocoa, curses and others. They are are fairly horrible to use.. GTK/TK/wx/curses all seem to basically be direct-ports of the appropriate C libraries, and Cocoa basically mandates using both PyObjC and Interface Builder, both of which I dislike.. The Shoes GUI library for Ruby is great.. It's v...

How to get controls in WPF to fill available space?

Hey, Didn't get a reply to this on the MSDN WPF forum, so I thought I'd try here. Some WPF controls - like the button - seem to happily consume all the availible space in its' container if you don't specify the height it is to have. And some - like the ones I need to use right now, the (multiline) TextBox and the ListBox - seem more w...

Is there a standard way to return values from custom dialogs in Windows Forms?

So right now my project has a few custom dialogs that do things like prompt the user for his birthday, or whatever. Right now they're just doing things like setting a this.Birthday property once they get an answer (which is of type DateTime?, with the null indicating a "Cancel"). Then the caller inspects the Birthday property of the dial...

Font-dependent control positioning

I'd like to use Segoe UI 9 pt on Vista, and Tahoma 8 pt on Windows XP/etc. (Actually, I'd settle for Segoe UI on both, but my users probably don't have it installed.) But, these being quite different, they really screw up the layout of my forms. So... is there a good way to deal with this? An example: I have a Label, with some blank spa...

Are there any guidelines for designing user interface for mobile devices?

I am creating an application for a Windows Mobile computer. The catch is that the device (Motorola MC17) does not have a touch screen or universal keys - there are only six programmable hardware keys. Fitt's law is not applicable here, most Microsoft guidelines are also moot. For now I'm mimicking Nokia's S60 keyboard layout as close as ...

How to create a graphical user interface mock-up for research?

I am a student and interested in doing some research on user interface. For some experiments, I have to change the behaviors of many default interactions in an operating system such as double-click or drag-and-drop in Windows (to make it faster, more efficient, etc.) The best way is to change the behaviors of these interactions in an o...

How do I implement a chromeless window with WPF?

I want to show a chromeless modal window with a close button in the upper right corner. Is this possible? ...

UI and event testing

So I know that unit testing is a must. I get the idea that TDD is the way to go when adding new modules. Even if, in practice, I don't actually do it. A bit like commenting code, really. The real thing is, I'm struggling to get my head around how to unit-test the UI and more generally objects that generate events: user controls, asynch...

What is the best way to create a wizard in C# 2.0?

I have a winforms application where users will be creating stock items, and a time of creation there are a number of different things that need to happen. I think the UI for this should probably be a wizard of some kind, but I'm unsure as to the best way to achieve this. I have seen a couple of 3rd party Wizard controls, and I have also...

drawing animations at the show of JDialog

What would be the best way to draw a simple animation just before showing a modal JDialog? (i.e. expanding borders from the mouse click point to the dialog location). I thought it would be possible to draw on the glasspane of the parent frame on the setVisible method of the dialog. However since the JDialog is modal to the parent, I coul...

How to add submenu items to the Windows Explorer context menu?

I can create a menu item in the Windows Explorer context menu by adding keys in the registry to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Folder\shell. How can I create submenu items to the just created menu item? ...

GUI/TUI linux library

Is there any UI library that can be to build both a text user interface (ncurses) and graphical user interface (GTK? QT?) from the same source? I know that debconf can be used with various frontends, I would like to build something similar but programmable. ...

Disable WPF label accelerator key (text underscore is missing)

I am setting the .Content value of a Label to a string that contains underscores; the first underscore is being interpreted as an accelerator key. Without changing the underlying string (by replacing all _ with __), is there a way to disable the accelerator for Labels? ...

User Interface Testing

We are working on a large project with a measure of new/modified GUI functionality. We've found in the past that we often introduced new problems in related code when adding new functionality. We have non-technical users perform testing, but they often miss parts and allow bugs to slip through. My question: Are there any best practice...