I'm almost certain I know the answer to this question, but I'm hoping there's something I've overlooked. Certain applications seem to have the Vista Aero look and feel to their caption bars and buttons even when running on Windows XP. (Google Chrome and Windows Live Photo Gallery come to mind as examples.) I know that one way to accom...
What techniques do you know\use to create user-friendly GUI ? I can name following techniques that I find especially useful: Non-blocking notifications (floating dialogs like in Firefox3 or Vista's pop-up messages in tray area) Absence of "Save" button MS OneNote as an example. IM clients can save conversation history automatically...
Of course the best metric would be a happiness of your users. But what metrics do you know for GUI usability measurements? For example, one of the common metrics is a average click count to perform action. What other metrics do you know? ...
I'm working on a C# winforms application (VS.NET 2008, .NET 3.5 sp 1). I have a search field on a form, and rather than have a label next to the search field I'd like to show some grey text in the background of the search field itself ('Search terms', for example). When the user starts entering text in the search field the text should di...
We maintain a system that has over a million lines of COBOL code. Does someone have suggestions about how to migrate to a GUI (probably Windows based) without losing all the business logic we have written in COBOL? And yes, some of the business logic is buried inside the current user interface. ...
Now that I know C++ i want to get into desktop application that have a UI instead of Command Prompt stuff, where should I start, and what are some good online resources? ...
I have a WCF service which includes UI components, which forces me to be in STA mode. How do I set the service behaviour to STA-mode? ...
I am sure a responsive UI is something that everyone strives for and the reccomended way to do stuff is to use the BackgroundWorker for this. Do you find it easy to work with ? Do you use it often ? Or do you have your own frameworks for lengthy tasks and reporting process. I have found that I am using it quite a lot and even using it...
I'm working on moving a client/server application created with C# and WinForms into the SOA/WPF/Silverlight world. One of the big hurdles is the design of the UI. My current UI is MDI driven and users rely heavily on child windows, having many open at the same time and toggling back and forth between them. What might be the best way to...
So I was reading those Windows Vista UI guidelines someone linked to in another question, and they mentioned that you should be able to survive a switch to 120 DPI. Well, I fire up my handy VM with my app installed, and what do we get... AAAAGH!!! MASSIVE UI FAIL! Everything's all jumbled: some containers aren't big enough for their tex...
Has anyone implemented Lightbox style background dimming on a modal dialog box in a MFC/non .net app. I think the procedure would have to be something like: steps: Get dialog parent HWND or CWnd* Get the rect of the parent window and draw an overlay with a translucency over that window allow the dialog to do it's modal draw rou...
I have an existing GUI application that should have been implemented as a service. Basically, I need to be able to remotely log onto and off of the Windows 2003 server and still keep this program running. Is this even possible? EDIT: Further refinement here... I do not have the source, it's not my application. ...
What are good Open Source / Free software packages that let you design GUIs quickly, like "on a napkin" style, but also give a bit of polish that you could throw into a slide deck? Preference would be to use some clipart/objects ala Visio, but not required. NOT: Visio PowerPoint KeyNote OmniGraffe Balsamiq (althought it's worth the m...
Is it possible, in Java, to make a JPanel skip drawing its background thus being transparent except for the components on it? ...
I currently have a class and I'm trying to create an easy GUI to create a collection of this class. Most of the attributes of this class are strings. However, one of the attributes I want the user to be able to set is an Enum. Therefore, I would like the user interface, to have a dropdownlist for this enum, to restrict the user from ent...
I'm looking for a simple solution for a yes/no dialog to use in a Java ME midlet. I'd like to use it like this but other ways are okey. if (YesNoDialog.ask("Are you sure?") == true) { // yes was chosen } else { // no was chosen } ...
I've found some examples using the Win32 api or simulating the ^+ button combination (ctrl-+) using SendKeys, but at least with the SendKeys method the listview grabs the cursor and sets it to an hourglass until I hit the start button on my keyboard. What is the cleanest way to do this? ...
I'm trying to test a simple WebForms (asp.net) based UI, and follow the MVP pattern to allow my UI to be more testable. As I follow the TDD methodology for backend algorithms, I find that there are some unit test refactorings that happen in the spirit of the DRY principle (Don't Repeat Yourself). As I try to apply this to the UI using ...
How do I implement a draggable tab using Java Swing? Instead of the static JTabbedPane I would like to drag-and-drop a tab to different position to rearrange the tabs. EDIT: The Java Tutorials - Drag and Drop and Data Transfer. ...
Can you have a multicolumn listview control where one of the columns is a checkbox? Example code or links would be greatly appreciated. i am using visual studio 2005 ...