Many programs (often large ones, like MS Office, The GIMP, Maxthon) have a feature called "tip-of-the-day". It explains a small part of the program, like this one in Maxthon: "You can hide/show the main menu bar by pressing Ctrl+F11" You can usually browse through them by clicking next. And other options provided are "Previous", "Close...
What are some best practices on enabling a web application to support multiple resolutions? Specifically resolutions that are wide-screen vs. normal aspect ratio. It doesn't seem like there is an easy answer - other than simply supporting a few fixed resolutions and using some absolute positioning to get the layout to work correctly. ...
I'm also interested in more general thoughts, but here is my specific problem. In an ASP.NET web app, I am connecting to a 3rd-party via API. The 3rd-party requires that the user login and answer a few configuration questions to set this up. All of the questions except one the user can just choose the default. On one question if the user...
I have successfully worked with abstracting data layers and business layers. But recently a colleague mentioned about abstracting UI layer- in between the UI and the business layer. However I cannot get my head around it. I cannot visualize how this UI layer will be different from the business layer. I have goggled enough for articles an...
I need to store which node currently has focus in a yui TreeView component. I thought that there would be a method to find which node has focus at any one time but can't seem to find it. Does anyone know if such a method exists or otherwise suggest a way to do this? thanks in advance, ...
I'm looking to make a selection of a (Java-based) framework for UI development, with the following constraints: The application requires very simple UI (form with 1 or 2 buttons results in a list of images, texts, etc) but the actual types of UI element rendered are numerous. We already have the backend logic (in the form of a web serv...
I find that designers and managers tend to ridicule user interface designs created by programmers. Without question there have been tons of poor user interfaces made by programmers in the past, but it seems like the norm to assume all user interface designs made by programmers are bad. Developers who strive to constantly improve themsel...
My UI designer gives me great UI mockups created in Photoshop. I want to exactly match the colors in the mockup, but every time I create a color using the -colorWithCalibratedRed:green:blue:alpha: method of NSColor, the colors do not match. I have tried sampling the colors from the Photoshop mockup using the Pixie app in /Developer/Appl...
Background: Customer X has two lists of words. None of these words exists in any corpus of text in any known language. They are purely proprietary jargon. The first list is a list of words owned by Organization X. The second list is a list of words owned by his closest competitor, Organization Y. For a concrete example: Organization ...
I'm having some fun trying to get my head around some MVP stuf, as it pertains to User Controls. I'm using .NET WinForms (or something close to it) and Supervising Controller pattern (well, I think I am :). The User Control is itself part of an MVP application (its the View and has an associated Presenter etc). The Presenter is always ...
Any nice Paneled user interface component COM/ActiveX/Source-code for C#/VB? Like what VS has internally: Dock to screen edges Slide open/close (unpinned) Pin open Group in tabs And if possible, open-source/free. Well, because otherwise I'd have to develop an interface system myself. ...
In Android, when layout out widgets, what's the difference between fill_parent and wrap_content? Is there any documentation where you can point to? I'm interested in understanding it very well. ...
How do you implement a context menu triggered by a long click or tap on a ListActivity that is using the built in layouts and a ListAdapter? ...
I'm looking to build a "quick link" directory access widget. e.g. (option 1) 0-9 | A-F | G-K | L-P | Q-U | V-Z Where each would be a link into sub-chunks of a directory starting with that character. The widget itself would be used in multiple places for looking up contacts, companies, projects, etc. Now, for the programming part... ...
This is a question I both loathe and respect depending on where it comes from. Its not a question of effective interface design, but rather 'should the UI be a strong selling point for the software product'? This question impacts project planning, design and over-all cost. However you will not find many ergonomic or "sexy" requirements ...
My coworker and I constantly argue about button sizes. I like to have buttons that have a fixed size (ie if minimized/maximized the button sizes dont change,other controls may but not buttons), width= text in it and height=27 -30 pixels. My co-worker prefers buttons that are only 20 pixels in height and the width is docked to vary as s...
Programming is particularly different to, for example word processing due to the wealth of special symbols etc that need to be entered. Of the current crop of new user interface techniques, which are suited to programming and why? Or is the idea of a language syntax the problem, should we be programming more symbolically, and if so, ho...
The expected behaviour on enter in a form seems to be undefined in the HTML 4.01 Specification while the HTML 5 specification says it should be the first submit button in the form. Internet Explorer (IE) highlights the first button in the form when the form has focus by adding a proprietary border or something. Other browsers do not ad...
I've been having a look at several MVC frameworks (like rails, merb, cakephp, codeignitier, and similars...) All the samples I've seen are basically plain and simple CRUD pages, carrying all the infr needed in the querystring and the posted field values. I've got a couple of apps made with some sort of framework built with classic asp....
How do you write the kind of histogram UI like the one in Task Manager in Windows? The best I could find is this one below http://www.codeproject.com/KB/custom-controls/performancecountercontrol.aspx But it is ASP.net web ui, which is not usable in my standalone executable project. I'm trying to write a performance history meter appl...