Even though MDI is considered harmful, several applications (even MS Office, Adobe apps) still use it either in its pure form or some as a hybrid with a tabbed/IDE-like interface. Is an MDI interface still appropriate for some applications? I'm thinking of an application where one typically works with several documents at one time, an...
It seems to me that whenever a GUI (Graphical User Interface) is involved, the look and feel of the interface nearly always trumps the performance of the application. Is this a universal phenomenon? ...
We have a user experience designer in our team who has no programming background. He is expected to design screens within Eclipse as a development environment. His (valid) complaint is that every time he designs a specific screen and gives it to development - they tell him what is not possible technically using either SWT or GEF. So, he ...
Given a very large database of product names, how would you detect possible typos in user searches and suggest possible corrections (Kinda like the way Google presents them)? E.g. User enters "fork handels" and presses 'search'. They get back "No results. Did you mean 'fork handles'?" ...
Where you have a databound list of items and for each item you may want to provide users the ability to (for example): Delete Download View Detail or 'mark' in some way You have a few options: Provide buttons or links within the row itself to complete the operation on the row item Provide a checkbox select within the row and then a...
I want to make a multi-language site, such that all or almost all pages will be available in 2 or more translations. What are the best practices to follow? For example, I consider these language selection mechanisms: Cookie-based selection of the preferred language. Based on Accept-Language header if the cookie is not set. Based on Ge...
I'd like to develop a network graph application for Flex - imagine placing nodes on a Canvas and connecting them with links. The nodes should have editable text and other UI components. I'm trying to find examples of creating an entirely new UI component from scratch, but all I've been able to find are trivial examples that extend exis...
A line in this answer, "Get used to using the Mac on its own terms", took me aback a little bit, and made me start to think about something I pondered ages ago and still haven't come up with a good answer to. Each OS has its own guidelines for how to develop an application's interface so it fits with the OS, and consequently the mindset...
I have an HTML table that contains a large number of rows and columns. The top row contains headers, and the first cell in every row below that contains a header. I need to allow the user to scroll the table whilst keeping the top row and left column visible at all times (similar to what can be achieved using the "freeze cells" option i...
Is there a professional service or product anyone recommends for improving the ui of an existing asp.net web forms application? All web controls/elements use css classes and there is a single css file where the look and feel and be controlled. I'd like to have a professional designer improve the color scheme/font/layout, without having...
Hi, is it possible to change the selected item in a winforms application using c# UI automation (same logic as UIspy.exe)? I would like to change the selected item to a specific item (I know it's index/position in the list). ...
It's quite common to have a form with a checkbox stating "Use foo" immediately followed by a textbox where the user can input the "foo value" he want's to use. Of course, this textbox is useful only if "Use foo" is checked I don't know the best way to deal with this situation : Disable the textbox (ie textboxfoo.Enabled=false;) Hide i...
I'm a web developer focused on UI. Many interface features in my web application are based on double-clicking. In IE, this brings up that new annoying "accelerators" icon which interferes with my user interface. Is it possible to disable "accelerators" on my pages? Maybe with some new stupid IE-specific meta tag? ...
I want to do some housekeeping before executing any external console applications (setting some environment vars). In my web research, it looks like overriding NotifyBeginApplication() in $host might do the trick. Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to do that. Here's essentially what I want to do... $host = $host | ` Add-Member ...
I am building a asp.net webforms (3.5 sp1) application, using jquery where I can to animate the UI, change its state. It has worked great until I started doing postbacks, where the UI obviously resets itself to its initial state. So my question is, what are the best practices for saving and restoring jquery/UI state between postbacks? ...
All you Stackoverflowers, I was wondering why GUI code is responsible for sucking away many, many cpu cycles. In principle, the graphical rendering is far less complex than Doom (although most corporate GUIs will introduce lots of window dressing). The event handling layer is also seemingly a heavy cost, however, it seems that a well-...
Question: I have a question that is apparently not answered by this already-asked Bash completion question on Stack Overflow. The question is, how to get Bash alias completion (for any alias) on a partial substring. Example: For example, assume I have the following aliases: open.alicehome="cd /usr/home/alice" open.bakerhome="cd /usr/ho...
From an interview with Peldi Guilizzoni, the creator of Balsamiq--an Adobe AIR application for creating mockups: And then you started working on the first version Balsamiq Mockups. Was there any hurdles in the development process? Ha! There's always hurdles, it's part of the fun of coding isn't it? Let me think. I t...
Design stencils and wireframes are cool! It would be terribly time consuming to mockup applications without them. Which are your favorites and where can they be viewed/downloaded? ...
I just need to draw a sitemap as a document. Visio conceptual sitemap is an overkill and not friendly. I havent tried COnceptdraw. What I am looking for is a simple lite tool. Good if I can make a flash or exe export so that I can send it to the client. ...