Star Improving Computer Interfaces & Usability
Linked by Mayuresh Walke on Thu 21st Apr 2005 08:01 UTC
Graphics, User Interfaces What's the best way to: a. Improve usability in software applications? b. Review usability of existing software? c. Generate, encourage and review new ideas on software UI design? d. Make all this research work freely available to everyone (open source, proprietary, etc.)? e. Connect with all developer groups and individuals out there to share this work with them? Read more to find out.
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Something about "flash"
by malkia on Thu 21st Apr 2005 10:52 UTC

UI design is like a religion - some people might find it pragmatic, some dogmatic, and some can find the light they were looking for all life. Some change it a lot, some little, and some are fine with what-ever it is. Some are always on the most-popular one, and some are strictly orthodox... And wars, and wars, and wars.

Heh, okay - I dunno... Lastly I've took this look at UI design, from portable programming perspective:

1. Native look approach (aka wxWidgets). Do whatever you do, make sure that your app looks native on the platform it's running on.
And that's not only to take care of the look&feel, but also to be able to use the IME, the Speech, or reading capabilities the system is giving you.
For example Qt or FLTK, by not using native system-widgets are unable to cooperate with what the system is giving you additionally (for example a service which is reading the text off your window, if that was a standard GUI window - then the service would work - a.k.a. wxWidgets).

2. Then again, sometimes widgets which look one and same everywhere are preffered - for example typical audio-plugins (VST), which are full blown sets of cool-buttons, knobs, etc, or games, or application which are not supposed to be runned by everyone (I do not expect my granny to tackle with the latest reverb, or echo audio plugin).

So clearly if you decide that your project would need to create UI accessible for everyone, then you are actually limiting yourself. Freedom for one thing, is limitation for another.

Lastly I was mocking around with the wonderfull non-native widget GUI (actually full-blown framework) JUCE kit. It's located here:

http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/

The author has some cool demo on his site:

http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/downloads/jucedemo.exe
http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/downloads/jucedemo.dmg

First for Windows, second for Mac OS X.

http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/api/index.html

or CHM:

http://www.rawmaterialsoftware.com/juce/api/juce.chm

I've did a small app (System-Wide Environment Editor) really quickly in it. Here it is (sources+exe included)

http://homepage.mac.com/malkia/swee32.zip (285kb).