We're in the position to make drastic

changes to the appearance of our software.

So far we've been focusing on getting our software

to behave. Looks have been secondary.

Our stuff has great flow and lots of nice features.

(We're not using MDI and don't want to. The other works better for us)

We're getting ready to put in:

]bmp check boxes with combined text across the top for options

like save, print, delete, close etc. instead of 

pulldown menu options.

]floating toolbar for most often used screens and utilities

]tabbed screens instead of showing everything on one screen

]custom colors like soft beige, etc.

Could anyone share some ideas of attractive screens?

Any ideas will help.

Donald, some of our customers are really excited about

new screen layouts, mostly as a result

of your talk at the conference. We appreciate your help.

Thanks - Jackie

Jackie,

Were you there or just your customers? If I had done my job right they would be pushing you to go MDI!

]bmp check boxes with combined text across the top for options like save, print, delete, close etc. instead of pulldown menu options.

I think you really mean PUSHBMP's, i.e. buttons with BMP's. This is easy, just create a BMP with a minimum of two-stages (the "up" look and the "down" look) and then tell your pushbutton to use this BMP after you have loaded it into the repository. If you want to get fancy and have float-over affects and such then you will need to investigate how to do that (several posts over the years have discussed more or less how to do this) or get a drop-in routine like Sprezz's Button_97() or our Coolbar_Menu() to do this for you.

]floating toolbar for most often used screens and utilities

Do you mean a true floating toolbar, i.e. a modeless dialog box? What will be on this toolbar?

]tabbed screens instead of showing everything on one screen

Pretty soon you can create tabbed controls using the WinAPI commands or just drop in an OCX control but if you want to do this now then we believe the easiest approach is to create a BMP with all of the tabs within it. This needs to be a multi-frame BMP where each frame represents one tab having focus. Then use the BUTTONDOWN event to trap the mouseclick and then switch pages and the frame in the bitmap simultaneously.

]custom colors like soft beige, etc.

Where are these colors going to be seen? Are we talking about the background color of the window or different bitmaps that will be on the form?

dbakke@srpcs.com

SRP Computer Solutions, Inc.

Jackie,

to follow up on Don's comments .. there are a couple great books on GUI design and I would stongly suggest you take a look at them. One of them is from Microsoft press and several from Wiley publishing. I wish I had the names handy (why would I need to read those but before going to the time and expense you might want to do some reading.

I have found that at times developers (of course i would never do this) tend to do things that actually get in the way of the user and their work. I am sure that you will be but please be very careful in your facelift.

Reminds me of the recent 'Sex in the City' show where Miranda (no .. not her) got a chemical peel before a big event .. tore the skin right off her face ..

Things like a tabbed interface, multipage etc can be much better BUT there have been a couple of situations I have been in where the user really really liked their BIG SCREEN approach. They needed all the info right there .. no clicking. Just data ..

So be careful out there ..

dsig@sigafoos.org.com onmouseover=window.status=the new revelation technology .. a refreshing change;return(true)"

David Tod Sigafoos ~ SigSolutions

Phone: 503-639-4240

OS: Win2k sp2 (5.00.2195)

OI: 4.1 beta (pre 082002)

there are a couple great books on GUI design and I would stongly suggest you take a look at them

We've learned a lot from the following:

The Elements of User Interface Design - Theo Mandel / Wiley Publishing

About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design - Alan Cooper / IDG Books

The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design - Microsoft Press

dbakke@srpcs.com

SRP Computer Solutions, Inc.

Great list of books Don.

One more good one is

Access 97 Expert Solutions by Stan Lezynski (QUE Press )

Wrong product but lots of good information. In particular he recommends the SDI approach for database screens, so It should help you Jackie. He makes the point that tabbed dialogs are just a variation on SDI. I have played with using an MDI screen as the "Single Document", using Sheets as Panels, with one sheet on the left having nothing but a read only edit table that lists all the rows, kind of like a visible qbf list. The sheets do the real editing. The sheets are simple windows, bound to a single row in a single table, so little coding is needed on them. The frame acts as a container for the sheets. The whole unit behaves as a single document. A way to get the same effect as a tabbed dialog where different tabs change different tables. Copy msAccess behavior and save the data without prompting whenever the user moves to a different row or sheet. If you need transactions then you will need to do more a lot more work with the frame events.

Hope this helps

Bob

Wow that was fast!

Thanks so much to you both.

Yes Donald. You knocked the socks off our customers.

They went to the show without us. I guess that means

we need to be charging more.

Thank you for the book list.

I have discussed the tab question with my customers.

Some do like to see everything on one screen, but

they are already set and we're not messing with theirs.

These excited customers and

the new customers coming up have confirmed they do

want the tabbed look. The 'windows' look.

We did watch that episode with the face lift on HBO.

This will affect everything. We feel brave.

Ok. 1. Thanks to your previous help I do know

how to make the bmps and edit them to make

them appear 3-d. Both as buttons and check boxes.

So that works great.

2. Thanks to your help on previous discussions I

know how to do the tabbed thing. With the bmp tabs

in colors to match the group box. Which was throwing

me for a loop because the standard OI tab ended up

always being the same color as the main screen background.

So I got that down.

3. The color edit thing, I'm using custom colors for the

tab group box and tabs. Because… the standard colors

are too bright or stark or something. Beige looks nicer.

My display is set at High Color 16 Bit. I think our

customers will have that or better. Is that a safe bet?

Is that not a safe bet?

4. Thanks to your previous help, Donald, I know how to

do the floating tool bar. But I was going to use it for

universal things, like going to the Customer Master,

Vendor Master, Inventory Master, look up Inventory by

different criteria, etc. I wasn't going to use it for

things like 'print' because on some screens there are

10 or 12 different forms they need to print.

Ok. Here we go. We're going to get the books.

Tell me other ideas.

Thanks!

Hi Bob.

Put what used to be a whole screen into one of the pages of a

tabbed screen and when they click out of it have it save changes?

Use the inactive command of the smaller window as the

trigger to save?

And another idea to have a list on the left, and when

they click on a product from that list, populate

the tabbed form on the right?

Thanks!

The User Interface Hall Of Shame is also an amusing take on How Not To Do Things :)

The Sprezzatura Group

World leaders in all things RevSoft

Jackie

Like everyone else we LOVE "About Face". One of our favourite books of all time - knocked "Solid Code" off the top spot.

We're adherents of the tabbed SDI approach for "end users" and the MDI approach for "power users" but ultimately the tabbed SDI can always be implementd as a specialised MDI.

Checkout the Products and Services/Samples sections of http://www.sprezzatura.com for some screen shots which may give you some ideas…

The Sprezzatura Group

World Leaders in all things RevSoft

Thanks. Thats great.

I'm still reading it.

Can I also ask, is there any way to wrap text

on the Combined Text/Bitmat controls?

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