In article news:<AF0D31E3-F8F6-4851-917C-68DB6BAAF029>,
Tom Serface wrote:
> Well, I'd guess enough people disagree with you so as to convince
> the MFC group to include a ton of new skinning features in the
> standard MFC build.

That's typical of Microsoft -- when Windows first came out (and again,
even more, when Windows 3 came out and actually looked nice) they made
big noises about platform uniformity and consistency and how this made
apps easy to use and easy to document and easy to train people to use.

Why, I even have a copy of the "IBM SAA CUA Advanced Interface Design
Guide" that was supplied as part of the documentation for a Windows SDK
(may have been the NT 3.1 SDK, I don't recall).

Now, a few years down the line, they've forgotten all that wisdom and
decided to try to be "cool" ... so they've started to implement
technologies that deliberately undermine the uniformity and consistency
that they (correctly) told us was so important.

> ... it's possible to have a slightly different look (like just about
> every version of Office), but still act like a typical Windows
> program.

Yes, it's possible ... but what's the point? If it just looks a little
different but behaves in just the same way there is no material benefit
to the user -- the change is purely cosmetic and so a waste of
development effort.

OTOH if it also behaves differently then it doesn't "act like a typical
Windows program" -- the change is counterproductive and evil.

Microsoft should set the world a good example by sticking to their own
UI design guidelines (which are good ones, based on the IBM SAA CUA UI)
and by making close adherence to those guidelines a logo requirement.

If, as may happen, a new GUI metaphor is developed and thought to be
good enough to be worth adding to the UI design guidelines that's fine
-- it can be added to the guidelines and software support for it can be
added to Windows though common controls, etc.. No problem.

What an application should NOT do is to use any GUI metaphor that is
not native to the platform on which it is running (unless it is a
compound of existing native GUI elements). The widget set should be
defined by the platform and should be common to all applications
running on that platform.

<rant>
Some would say that the Office 2007 "Ribbon" is an example of a good
new GUI metaphor -- I don't care for it much, but I know it has its
followers. Whatever the merits of the ribbon as a GUI metaphor, MS's
mechanism for introducing it in Office is a fine example of how NOT to
promote a consistent and uniform user interface. MS should have added
the ribbon to *Windows* as new set of GUI tools available to all users,
and they should have published an updated design guide that described
how the ribbon should interact with the other controls a user will
expect to see.

What they did -- as we all know -- was to implement the ribbon entirely
within Office 2007, and do so in a way that did not enable the ribbon
code in Office to be used by any other application.

This means that Office 2007 has a GUI that conflicts with the published
design guidelines for Windows applications, and that it operates in a
different manner from other applications on the platform. By making the
ribbon code a part of the Office application rather than a set of
common controls they have made it very difficult for any other
application to support the same ribbon GUI because such an application
will perforce be running different ribbon code, and cannot be
guaranteed to have the same behaviour.
</rant>

Cheers,
Daniel.

In article news:<B38E087C-E6B2-4C57-9156-C6F34B54FCCB>,
David Ching wrote:
> MS even does this with the list control. If you go to My Computer
> in XP, you will see the different groups such as "Hard Disk Drives",
> "Network Drives", etc. in boldface.

That's not what we're talking about at all ... what you write in the
client area of an application's windows is outside the scope of the
design guidelines.

> I am simply extending this concept into my own dialogs where I
> put some static controls as boldface.

... but there your are changing the appearance of something that has a
standard appearance so that your application has a non-standard
appearance. Boldfacing a bit of static text probably won't hurt, but do
you *know* that it won't? Are your dialogs equally accessible to
partially-sighted persons using screen-reader devices, for example?

This PC has an Asus motherboard, which came with a little application
called Asusprob that displays a slightly-skinned but recognizably
Windows-like window with tabs that display various information about
the hardware status, software environment, etc.. Useful information,
the window looks a little odd, but I can live with it.

I have another PC with a newer Asus motherboard that came with a newer
version of Asusprob that displays as a hexagonal scarab-like window
that 'telescopes' open horizontally when clicked. There are mystical
symbols of no readily-discernible meaning that one can click on to
change the information displayed. The thing is a disaster. This is the
sort of thing I'm really campaigning against when I say that skinning
is evil.

Cheers,
Daniel.

Yes, it is important to maintain some consistency and remember your market.
I don't know that I'd use words like "evil", but I'm certainly no purest
when it comes to GUI design. I do take exception to programs that are
difficult to use and don't work as advertised so I spend more time working
in that area...

Still, with so many versions of Windows to support all looking slightly
different it is difficult to maintain any kind of standard appearance these
days.

Tom

"Daniel James" <wastebasket> wrote in message
news:7f6f
[..]

"Daniel James" <wastebasket> wrote in message
news:7f6f
>> MS even does this with the list control. If you go to My Computer
>> in XP, you will see the different groups such as "Hard Disk Drives",
>> "Network Drives", etc. in boldface.
>
> That's not what we're talking about at all ... what you write in the
> client area of an application's windows is outside the scope of the
> design guidelines.
>

My recollection is that this UI discussion started with the observation that
..NET made it easy to set font on a per-control basis on a form (dialog), and
my comments are related to that.


>> I am simply extending this concept into my own dialogs where I
>> put some static controls as boldface.
>
> .. but there your are changing the appearance of something that has a
> standard appearance so that your application has a non-standard
> appearance. Boldfacing a bit of static text probably won't hurt, but do
> you *know* that it won't? Are your dialogs equally accessible to
> partially-sighted persons using screen-reader devices, for example?
>

If it does, then MS has the same problems.


> This PC has an Asus motherboard, which came with a little application
> called Asusprob that displays a slightly-skinned but recognizably
> Windows-like window with tabs that display various information about
> the hardware status, software environment, etc.. Useful information,
> the window looks a little odd, but I can live with it.
>
> I have another PC with a newer Asus motherboard that came with a newer
> version of Asusprob that displays as a hexagonal scarab-like window
> that 'telescopes' open horizontally when clicked. There are mystical
> symbols of no readily-discernible meaning that one can click on to
> change the information displayed. The thing is a disaster. This is the
> sort of thing I'm really campaigning against when I say that skinning
> is evil.
>

Well, this is the kind of thing that will sort itself out in the market. It
could be Asus users delight in this kind of thing. I don't, and you don't,
but I'm not getting religion and saying the CUA UI designed for a standard
of 1 font per window is the gold standard for all time either.

Like it or not, web interfaces have done more to influence what a good UI is
than MS or IBM or any other committee could have, and it's time Windows apps
got with the program and be at least as good looking as web apps. If not,
rich client apps will be abandoned even more quickly than they already are!

-- David

> I also think your perspective works well for a large company producing
> large
> apps that are widely deployed in many languages, but is not entirely
> relevant to others whose customers are more niche and less
> internationalized. In my projects, localization is a concern but it is not
> important enough to dictate limiting the UI just to make it easier to
> localize.


It is not only about languages and localization.

Think accesibility
- older people need big fonts
- power users want proper keyboard navigation
(so all the tab handling, quick keys, accelerators, shoud work)
- add to the ecuation screen-readers (applications that not only "read"
what is in a control, but have to know that the control is a radio
button, is the checked, has focus, and it is not disabled)

Score a project for some guvenment organization and suddenly your
application is discualified (accesibility is a big one for them).

So no, it is not about "many languages" at all.

> I mean: it seems to me that you are very sober (in Italian I would say
> "francescano" :) in GUI designing, and considering that you work in an
> important software house and you are expert in internationalization,
> there must be some good reason for your opinion..., e.g. only one font
> in dialog, no bold face, etc.

If you look at some of the products from that software house, there
are quite a few that use custom controls.
And also quite a few that s*ck at i18n.


> So, are you against the style of WPF GUIs, that seems to me to be all
> kind of skinning, rich of colors, "Hollywood-style" graphics, etc. ?

I don't like it.

The localization model for WPF (if there is such a thing :-) is not great.
Another disaster is the autolayout: usless, since the panels only accept
fixed sizes (you cannot say that the width of something is 30%).
This is something that works in Qt (and the X Windows world), wxWidgets,
Java, Flex, even .NET forms.
Couldn't they take a look ar some of that for some inspiration?

..NET 1.0 was has great i18n API (with a messier localization story)
That one propagates nicely all the way to WPF and Silverlight 2.0

But I think this is more of an exception to the rule, with MS
getting somethign right from version 1.0
With WPF we are back to the old model: wait for version 3 :-)


I think the trend will go away. Not completely, but will go back.

It was almost the same when computers started to support 256 colors
instead of 16.
Every button had an icon, all labels had shadows, and every control
had to get some kind of "3D" feel (embossed, rised, sunken, etc.)
It was a full industry of ActiveX controls for VB (and some of the
same companies are selling now skinning libraries :-)

And remember Kai Krause (search Kai power tools in Google - Images)
Everybody said "this is the next big thing, this is the future"
But it is not catch.
Because no two applications where the same, and you could spend
3 minutes looking for a certain button or option.

And compare Mac OS X 10.0 with 10.5
That was overdone, too much glow, transparency, animation, background
with horizontal lines (who thought that is a good idea?)
It got milder and milder as it went,

Compare this (10.0)
http://www.iindigo3d.com/macos/macosxpb.jpg
to this (10.5):
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/26/51...98ebe4c0_o.jpg


So, just a bit of patience.
Some of the good ideas will remain, but the junk will go away.

> Like it or not, web interfaces have done more to influence what a good UI
> is than MS or IBM or any other committee could have

Whaaaat? Good UI?

The 800x600 pixels web pages on my 1600x1200 screen, wasting 75% of that
space, and in the same time being unreadable, the only way to scroll is
by being able to grab a 4x4 pixel round knob, ignoring my keyboard,
streaming music, and ignoring me pressing the back button of the browser?

Yes, there are some good sites out there. But very few.
And you will notice that those sites are carefull not to go overboard.

2-3 font families? Yes.
3-5 font sizes? Yes.
2-3 colors? Yes.


Beyond that is abuse.
And it is not me saying that.
These are lessons from the typography world.
They had some hundreds of years to refine it.
Look for "The Elements of Typographic Style"


Gradient background, objects with glow, shadows, and reflection, animated
in a rotating carusel of 252 objects? No, thanks!
That's not progress.

"Mihai N." <nmihai_year_2000> wrote in message
news:hain
>
> Another disaster is the autolayout: usless, since the panels only accept
> fixed sizes (you cannot say that the width of something is 30%).
> This is something that works in Qt (and the X Windows world), wxWidgets,
> Java, Flex, even .NET forms.
> Couldn't they take a look ar some of that for some inspiration?
>

I'm almost postive the WPF grid layout can specify percentages.

-- David

"Mihai N." <nmihai_year_2000> wrote in message
news:hain
[..]
> And it is not me saying that.
> These are lessons from the typography world.
> They had some hundreds of years to refine it.
> Look for "The Elements of Typographic Style"
>> Gradient background, objects with glow, shadows, and reflection, animated
> in a rotating carusel of 252 objects? No, thanks!
> That's not progress.
>

Sure some is overblown. But you think 2-3 font familes with 3-5 font sizes
is OK? Then why not for Windows apps? Why do you insist on following some
obsolete Control Panel settings, and not web browsers?

-- David

> I'm almost postive the WPF grid layout can specify percentages.
Try it. It does not.

> Sure some is overblown. But you think 2-3 font familes with 3-5 font sizes
> is OK? Then why not for Windows apps? Why do you insist on following some
> obsolete Control Panel settings, and not web browsers?

It is ok in certain web pages, the ones with a lot of text content.
More like traditional typography.
In the end, it is about percentages.
If you have 5 paragraphs, 5 fonts sizes is too much.

In a dialog you can probably go with 2, max 3 variations.
Let's say one bold, and maybe a bigger font. But that's it.
Remember: people have problems with a huge number of objects (controls).
The good number is somewhere around 7.
So a good dialog design will have about 7 "input elements",
meaning 7 labels and 7 edit controls, or 3 radio buttons and 4 check-boxes.
(ok, remember that the number is "around 7", not exactly 7)
If you have too many, and you have to split the dialog in a wizard,
or in tabs.
You might also mitigate some of the problems with grouping them.
But there is only so much you can do.

Here is an example:
http://jcooney.net/archive/2006/10/30/36235.aspx

Anyway, the point is, when all you can have is 10 labels and 4 buttons,
what are you going to do with 3 fonts and 5 fonts sizes?

You can maybe go with bolds for some kind of group titles.
Maybe change some colors to red to signal input errors.


Second thing: a web page is more like a magazine, it is designed to
entertain, waste time, have fun.
An application intended for productivity is more like a book.
More sober, should not get in the way.
And even for web sites many designers recomend to choose a palete of
about 3 colors and use them consistently.

A book has less variation than a magazine.
Usually 2 fonts (body and headings), about 3 sizes (body and two headings)
and on ocasion a bold or italic.
Geek, technical books go beyond that, but not much.
And remember, we are talking hundreds of pages here.
You don't often get a title, 3 headings, bold, italic, bullets, indents,
all on one page.


Moderation, good taste.

>> I'm almost postive the WPF grid layout can specify percentages.
> Try it. It does not.

My bad.
I was thinking Silverlight.

The WPF grid has some thing with stars where you can say
"this column is 2 times wider than the others"

Mihai N. wrote:

> [...snip interesting considerations...]
> Moderation, good taste.

Thanks: you offered us very interesting material to reflect.

Giovanni

In article news:<DC09FF6E-3E47-4A54-94EF-56B531D9EA81>,
David Ching wrote:
> Sure some is overblown. But you think 2-3 font familes with 3-5
> font sizes is OK? Then why not for Windows apps?

You're missing the point. Nobody is suggesting that a Windows app
shouldn't be able to use more than 3 fonts -- it'd be a blow for Words
if they did!

What's being said here is that there are design guidelines for the
standard parts of GUI apps -- the "non-client" parts, if you will --
that are supposed to present a consistent user interface across all
applications, and that one should not alter that interface.

This in not just about fonts and colours -- it's about standard placing
of standard menus (in English we have "Cut" and "Paste" not "Snip" and
"Glue", they are found on a menu called "Edit" which is the second from
the left, next to "File"), about standard shortcuts, and about standard
idioms for navigating an app. The use of standards helps to make all
applications familiar to the user, and so helps the user to work
quickly and confidently with a variety of applications and a variety of
types of data.

Keeping the overall appearance of GUI elements like dialog boxes
consistent is part of this -- most users adapt very quickly to using
new applications (or at least to operating the GUIs of new
applications) if the user interface looks familiar, but a user
suddenly confronted with a dialog of outlandish appearance in an
unfamiliar application is likely come screeching to a halt and have to
spend time reading the documentation and/or asking colleagues for help.

I don't suggest that using an emboldened font for all static text in a
dialog is going to have that effect, but the more things differ from
the unadorned standard -- without obvious good reason -- the more
likely it is that some confusion will arise.

Some apps have a menu for font selection that displays the name of each
font /in/ that font. I don't think that a user who has decided to open
a menu that is obviously intended to allow the selection of a font will
be at all puzzled by the fact that the different fonts names have
different appearances -- try the same trick on the "File" menu and most
users will complain that the application has "gone wrong".

Much of this comes down to the "principle of least surprise", in the
end.

> Why do you insist on following some obsolete Control Panel settings,
> and not web browsers?

Control Panel settings are not obsolete. If you think that then you
have been paying too little attention to them.

The web is an anarchy of competing bad designs. Don't hold it up as an
archetype to be emulated!

Part of the trouble with the web is a lack of standardization between
browsers (and the failure of the most-used browser -- IE -- to comply
with a number of published standards exacerbates these difficulties
enormously).

Another part is the way that web standards have been built up from kits
of parts (by groups with different purposes in mind) and never really
made uniform -- it's a very different world from that of application
GUI design where the widget sets of any one platform are well-defined
and the widget sets of differing platforms have a good degree of
overlap of functionality. As nobody 'owns' the web nobody can
authoritatively set down GUI guidelines for web design with any hope
that they will be adopted. It's not that there are no guidelines for
good web design (or secure web design, for that matter) -- it is that
there are too many, and so they are all ignored.

This is not what Sir Tim wanted, I am quite sure!

Cheers,
Daniel.

"Mihai N." <nmihai_year_2000> wrote in message
news:hain
> In a dialog you can probably go with 2, max 3 variations.
> Let's say one bold, and maybe a bigger font. But that's it.

I agree, and that's what I do in my apps. But I still don't see how this
jives with your statement that since the .rc file only allows for one dialog
font, and so does the Control Panel settings that therefore dialogs should
contain 1 font.


> Second thing: a web page is more like a magazine, it is designed to
> entertain, waste time, have fun.
> An application intended for productivity is more like a book.

Some web pages are that way, but not for web apps like SalesForce.com.


> A book has less variation than a magazine.
> Usually 2 fonts (body and headings), about 3 sizes (body and two headings)
> and on ocasion a bold or italic.
> Geek, technical books go beyond that, but not much.
> And remember, we are talking hundreds of pages here.
> You don't often get a title, 3 headings, bold, italic, bullets, indents,
> all on one page.
>

A book is not interactive, you are staring at it for minutes or hours on end
so don't need to quickly grasp the various parts of the page and discover
what the page is all about. That's why fewer fonts work well.


> Moderation, good taste.
>

Yes, but the traditional MFC and .rc file is too moderate for modern appeal!


-- David