Re: Best book for creating GUI using Visual C++ (VS 2003)

Probably not surprising. For a long time, Apple had Donald Norman ("The Design of Everyday
Things"---which should be a prerequisite document for everyone doing GUI design to
read---as a consultant. Microsoft does not seem to have anyone establishing GUI design
principles, and these days, anyone with a p-baked idea (p is usually substantially < 0.1;
0.5 is half-baked) is free to build whatever bizarre interface demonstrates the
programmer's skills, whether it makes sense or not.

Never forget "Bob".

I've seen demos where, like "Bob", you "walk into a room". Nobody stops to question the
fact that we rarely walk into rooms when we are programming; since people do it, it must
be a natural paradigm. I don't want to walk into a room and look around; I want to sit
down and get some work done.

Even windowing is seen as cool, but 99% of the time, every app I have runs full-screen.
Rarely do I need to see two windows at once. When I need to see two things at once, I
usually need a lot of screen real estate, and two half-screens don't work. Right now I
have two 20" monitors, each of which is running full-screen windows. I expect my next
system will have a four-head display. I want LOTS of space, and lots of little windows are
not the same as lots of space!

When I'm working on Word, I find that I park all the tool windows on the right-hand
display, and do my editing full-screen in the left-hand display.

The other pardigm which isn't bad is the tiled-window-within-an-app approach, such as VS,
where I have watch windows, stack display, locals display, source code, and the project
tree all displayed at the same time. Often this is in the right-hand display while the app
I'm debugging is in the left-hand display so I can easily single-step through OnPaint
handlers. But I have little interest in lots and lots of concurrent windows on a single
monitor. There just isn't enough screen space. And I'm seeing a proclivity to that idea in
some of the stuff I've been seeing.

Perhaps it is time for Microsoft to start asking the users what they need, instead of
letting an anarchy of programmers playing theme-and-variation on badly-thought-out ideas.
joe
On Sat, 18 Jun 2005 09:08:43 +0200, "Johan Rosengren" <johan.rosengren@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Paul,
>
><whisper>http://developer.apple.com/ue/. There's lots of - scattered - good
>reading on usability on the Apple developer site</whisper>
>
>Johan Rosengren
>Abstrakt Mekanik AB
>
>"Paul Tremblay" <ptremblay@xxxxxxxxxxx> skrev i meddelandet
>news:d8uis2$ph7$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Hi all,
>>
>> First of all sorry for the cross post. I was not sure which ng would be
>> most appropriate.
>>
>> I need a book that gives guidelines on good GUI design (preferably, comes
>> with a few template GUIs one can extend). There seems to be so many books
>> out there, I would be very grateful to hear from any experienced GUI
>> designer out there - who can recommend a book for designing GUIs.
>>
>> A bit of background of my self. I am a C/C++ developer, but have some
>> basic GUI design experience using VBs Form Designer. I have a little
>> experience of MFC but I'm hoping to generate a lot of the boiler plate
>> stuff using MFCWizard.
>>
>> I look forward to any suggestions.
>>
>> MTIA
>>
>> PS: Any suggestions of libraries that I can use to enhance the GUI (e.g.
>> XP look and feel, chart controls etc) will be evry welcome.
>>
>

Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
email: newcomer@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Web: http://www.flounder.com
MVP Tips: http://www.flounder.com/mvp_tips.htm
.

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