I need to make a basic image viewer. The main concern is how to implement (in terms of gui components and image manipulation) such features as: zoom in-out, scroll and 'hand tool'. There seems to be several options for achieving this goal, differing mainly in degree of putting responsibilities on the graphical interface framework as opp...
There are a ton of lists out there of interview questions to test the candidate's programming aptitude. But my company is very UI-focused, and everyone is expected to be able to both code and design a decent UI. So once I've seen that the candidate can implement recursive Fibonacci and tell me its orders of growth in time and space, I ...
Hi all, I'm involved in writing a touchscreen application for a medical device. The program is kiosk-like, in that the start menu, etc, will not be accessible to the user, and the user will use an onscreen keyboard to type any text in the rare event that they need to. The spec'd screen size is 1280x1024. The question is this: What's...
I'm developing a UI (AJAX-enabled; LAMP server) which will allow a user to designate regions in which a company operates. A "region" in this case may be a state (if dealing with the US) a province (Canada), or entire country (everyone else). As there are 195 countries in the world, I would like to avoid a multi-select box or list of che...
Given words and their frequencies and an area of screen real estate, what are good approaches to fitting a tag cloud to the space? The two variables I can think of to manipulate are: Font sizes (both absolute and the gradient) Number of words Everything approach I can think of requires iteration, like setting an upper bound on the nu...
I need color indicators. Need to be able to do green, yellow and red. Anybody know how? I looked through the available icons/etc in Interface Builder but did not see anything like them. Like this: ...
I was wondering if anybody had any experience trying to run a complex SWT UI hosted inside a Swing component. I've managed to get a very simple demo going but if anyone else has tried and failed / succeeded to do this it'd be great to learn from their experiences. So to reiterate my application is a Swing app I wish to make use of a co...
Are there any plugins out there that will simulate a double click in any of the major browsers? I'm trying to test some code that prevents double clicks on form submission buttons, and would love to be able to either use a hot key or the middle mouse button to send a double click to the browser. Thanks Don ...
I'm designing some dialog boxes, and I'm having a hard time to fit everything. (and it has to fit on a single dialog box by design, so please don't tell me I should make two dialogs instead of one:)) I'm wondering what's the max size a dialog can have before being annoying for the end user. Of course it should't be bigger than his resol...
I would like to add a semi-transparent colour over the contents of a WPF window (to indicate the state of the window). Currently I am using a UserControl that fills the Window, and I change the Background colour and Visibility as required. The problem with this method is when the UserControl is visible, I cannot click any controls (Butt...
What is your opinion on whether a tagging user interface widget should require commas or spaces as the delimiter? For example, this site uses spaces, requiring multi-word tags to use a hyphen. I assumed this was some design suggestion from Joel; but then I realized that Facebook and Wordpress use commas. So what should it be? Or does...
I'm about to finish the core components of my application and I'm willing to change gears soon and do a bit of GUI programming. From the beginning I decided to write a WPF-based application for two reasons: a) I want my application to be visually stunning and 100% skineable. b) I completely suck at designing user interfaces and then som...
I'm developing a Winforms application which has been running for years with an explorer view (TreeView left, screen right). I means that: All the screens have an hierarchy organization All the nodes on TreeView have one and only one screen related. A screen gets activated when a node on treeview gets selected. One of the advantages i...
I have an web application with a dynamic number of tabs ranging between 2 to 20. I'm currently using Jquery UI's tab plugin, but finding that it's behaviour is less then Ideal (i.e. around 12 tabs, when it wraps, the second line of tabs move with the tab selection and sometimes jump across 3 lines instead of two. This is a two-fold que...
How do you handle real name conflicts? Is there an established best practice or UI design pattern for disambiguating records like this? If authors can have many articles but more than one author can possibly have the same name how would you enable users to select the author they actually want when creating articles? I can't dictate th...
I need a user interface that allows users to sort a table according to multiple columns (e.g. sort by color and then price within color, or alternatively price and then color within price). The only such interface I'm familiar with is the dialogue box found in Excel under data > sort, but this is rather clunky and does not yield itself t...
What's the quickest way to build admin interfaces in PHP? It can be a framework, a library/libraries coupled with a particular approach, or whatever. Background: I'm a Django developer spoiled by auto admin who has to deliver a web-app in PHP. The app is very admin-area/form heavy and has different access levels. ...
I am a small ISV. 2 developers. I have an existing application for windows that we sale. I would like to rewrite the UI using WPF and maybe even create a Silverlight version on the web. I have 20 years experience, and I learn things fast. I am sure I could learn XAML, WPF, and Silverlight. However, I am wondering if I should write the i...
I have an application whose interface is based around a typical OS user interface with draggable tabs. I want to make the tabs act like windows in an OS in the way that the last clicked tab/window appears 'on top' of any other windows. I know this has to do with the z-index of the elements. Here is a simplified version of the code: ...
Many animation effects are simply gratuitous eye candy -- however, there are situations where animations effectively communicate to the user what's going on. What are some of your favorite uses for animations, and what specific animation type would you use? E.g.: Animate items downwards when a new item is inserted into a list ...