Some of us just have a hard time with the softer aspects of UI design (myself especially). Are "back-end coders" doomed to only design business logic and data layers? Is there something we can do to retrain our brain to be more effective at designing pleasing and useful presentation layers? Colleagues have recommended a few books me i...
I am building a c# winform app and the framework I inherited uses UI Controls from this library LumiSoft These seem fine but aged and buggy. The previous developer preferred them for the smaller sizes they allowed. I recently discovered these controls for free as well: DevExpress These are much newer and more full featured. My questio...
Adobe AIR has enabled us push the boundary for creating Rich Internet Applications(RIA) outside the browser fence. Some companies have differentiated such applications as Rich Desktop Application (RDA). We have usability guidelines for Web, Desktop and RIA applications separately. But since, Adobe AIR has enabled us to create desktop ap...
What books about web user interface design can you recommend? I know, the technology behind a web site does not really matter for the UI design. But as I'm using ASP.NET, ASP.NET AJAX and jquery, it would be a plus if the book contains examples using these technologies. ...
Is there some standard way to make my applications skinnable? By "skinnable" I mean the ability of the application to support multiple skins. I am not targeting any particular platform here. Just want to know if there are any general guidelines for making applications skinnable. It looks like skinning web applications is relatively ea...
Anyone knows how to get selected text from other application using UI Automation and .Net? http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms745158.aspx ...
Whenever I click a JSlider it gets positioned one majorTick in the direction of the click instead of jumping to the spot I actually click. (If slider is at point 47 and I click 5 it'll jump to 37 instead of 5). Is there any way to change this while using JSliders, or do I have to use another datastructure? ...
I've already looked at this question, and I've already checked out the suggestions that were made there. My program creates and destroys a lot of UI controls (a lot of UI controls), and anything that makes controls hang around after they're "destroyed" will cause this problem. (Fun fact: if you don't set a ToolStrip control's Visible ...
I'm looking for something like the individual parts of the date picker dialog. A view that allows you to input integers (and only integers) that you can limit (between 1 and 10 for example), where you can use the keyboard or the arrows in the view itself. Does it exists? It is for a dialog. A ready-made dialog to request an integer woul...
Is there an elegant way to align 3 elements left, center, and right on the same line? Right now I'm using 3 <div>'s all with width:33%;float:left; and it's not working too well. ...
I have a "GUI Strings" .resx file in my application that holds all the strings that I display. I can obviously access each string directly via Resources.Resource_GUI_Strings.CameraSettings_BrightnessLabel But how do I list all the settings in the .resx file, as their (name, value) pair, is my only option using reflection? I want to...
I am trying to figure out an algorithm to calculate where to place any number of icons for a circular menu on a device with a screen that is 240x320. The icons are 48x48 but can be scaled to any size. I would like to come up with a generic algorithm that will take any number of icons in any size and calculate the best scale for them and ...
When designing a user interface for an application that is going to be used internationally it is possible to accidentally design an aspect of the UI that is offensive to or inappropriate in another culture. Have you ever encountered such an issue and if so, how did you resolve the design problem? Some examples: A GPS skyplot in a su...
A delay will always occur between a user action and an application response. It is well known that the lower the response delay, the greater the feeling of the application responding instantaneously. It is also commonly known that a delay of up to 100ms is generally not perceivable. But what about a delay of 110ms? What is the shortest...
For a standard "add item" form page it is desirable to have two submit buttons: an "OK" button and a "cancel" button, where the former POSTs the form to one URL, and the latter GETs some other URL. This obviously means that two separate FORMs are needed, and, if laid out with tables, the markup would go as follows: <form action="add.ht...
What is the best user interface toolkit ever developed? It should display usable interfaces that look nice and are easy to modify, a good API for the programmer, a good events model, etc. What makes your choice great? ...
I'm looking at some code that converts user names to lower case, before storing them. I'm 90% sure this is ok, but are there systems out there that actually require case sensitivity on the user names (specifically in the health industry)? Note: my particular code is not at the point of entry. We are taking user names from other systems...
I know it's a slightly rhetorical question, but I'd like to hear opinions that support or reject this doctrine as it will help me build a better case in my request to not use the dictated solution. A little background: I develop and maintain a large, mature application (VFP for the UI, Oracle PL/SQL for the middle and back end) that i...
I'm using Qt Jambi 4.4 for a project I'm working on (and designing the windows in the Qt Designer eclipse plugin). One of the windows I'd like to use is a preview window which is basically just a window with a QWebView on it. How can I make it so that the QWebView resizes as the window does? I've set the sizePolicy to expanding for bo...
I am in the process of converting a ASP.Net Web App to a C# WinForm App. I am struggling converting a specific page. This page is a questionnaire where each answer(usually rdo) determines what the next question will be. I originally had thought to just have all questions displayed and set the read-only property accordingly. Unfortu...