The Eric Wroolie Blog

Overpass Experiences

The Trials of GUI Design

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I’m a sucker for GUI design.

I know a lot of developers (especially non-Microsoft developers) who consider GUI design to be the worst part of a software project. It’s not difficult to see why. Imagine spending months working on a project–making sure everything works the way it should. You make sure that users can’t enter any illegal data, the application fails gracefully in a server outage, and it can hold the maximum amount of users. You also design the GUI so it is the most logical and user-friendly features.

What do UAT testers say to your Herculean efforts?

“I don’t like the font.”

They don’t like the font.

A two-minute afterthought on your part (“Should I use Arial or Times New Roman?”) and that is what they pick up on. “Yeah,” you recover, “but just go ahead and try to break the system. This thing is water-tight, baby!”

“Can’t we just change the font first?”

It is soul destroying, let me tell you.

I personally like GUI design, despite the criticism. Nothing feels better in a project than having the creative freedom to improve the user experience. When deprived of the freedom, it drives me crazy.

When I was at BBC, the development projects were divided into Designers and Developers (I was on the developer team). Designers would whip out cool looking graphics and html using Photoshop and Dreamweaver on their Macs (without having a clue as to how the application works in the background) and send the html and graphics to developers to add the plumbing.

For web applications, this division of developer and designer worked fine (well, it worked okay), but for desktop applications this was not really possible. Aside from sending screenshots to developers, there was little that could be done besides a developer trying to mimic the screenshot in the GUI (“You got the font wrong.”).

But now that all looks set to change with WPF in .Net 3. WPF, or Windows Presentation Foundation, is a set of libraries allowing an application present its GUI using a markup language with .Net 2 code facilitating the plumbing. Designers can use the Microsoft Expressions suite (a WYSIWYG XAML editor) to produce a GUI that developer can attach to their applications. Better yet, rather than waiting for designers to deliver the goods, developers and designers can work on the same project concurrently.

This post is going longer than I intended it to, so I will write more tomorrow about this. I’ve spent the last few days playing with XAML and Expressions Interactive Designer and am convinced that the era of GUI design is going to change quite a bit in the next few years.

MSDN Evenings in Reading

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A few years ago, I used to attend loads of MSDN evening event held at Microsoft Campus in Reading in the UK. They are basically a little lecture on a developer-centric topic with a small intermission and dinner. I’ve been to events about Asp.net, Biztalk server, Office XP, etc.

I just got back from my first Microsoft event for about three years.

Tonight’s topic: Windows Vista for Developer Features Beyond .Net.

The presentation was given by Daniel Moth and I was very impressed with the presentation.

One of the reason’s I haven’t been to many events recently is that I figured “well, I can just watch a webcast anytime I want.” But, I’m starting to realise some of the flaws with that theory. There is a big difference between watching a webcast and attending an event live.

Watching a webcast does not demand your full attention. Usually, the speaker, without an audience to feed off of, speaks in a monotonous voice and literally reads of power point slides. I often find it difficult to pay close attention and will start shifting through papers on my desk, etc. In a webcast, you can’t hear the reactions of the audience. With Microsoft products, it is not uncommon to hear developers groan at some of the claims made of the product. It’s always nicer to do this collectively.

Now, I don’t think all webcasts are bad. The DNRTV screencasts are very interesting with more code than slides and you get to witness Carl Franklin’s sense of humour when talking about otherwise dry subjects. I also find Rory Blythes screencasts on Channel9 to be very entertaining. But usually, booooring.

Tonight’s MSDN presentation by Daniel Moth was very good. No one looked bored, everyone enjoyed the stealth jokes, and I didn’t once feel like I was being fed marketing information on how great Vista would be. He was very objective with how things should work.

Another nice thing about attending a live event is hearing other people’s concerns and questions that had not occurred to me yet. I also get to hear the usual developer cynicism. While some, like myself, obviously thought incorporating RSS feeds into our applications would be a great idea, others claimed they couldn’t see the reason for it.

When we were looking at the new Vista Sidebar, someone asked why anyone would use it when they had Google Sidebar. A collective groan filled the room.

Attending a live event also gives you the opportunity to chat with other like-minded developers. Great.

If you like in the UK near Reading or London, I highly recommend attending a Microsoft event.

GTD Outlook Add-In–Who needs it?

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I’m nearly finished with my 30 day trial of the GTD outlook add-in. GTD stands for “Getting Things Done” and is intended David Allen’s fantastic book on productivity.

The Add-in is very simple. Anyone with any VSTO knowledge could create it quite simply. It provides the user with a toolbar that allows them to set emails to “Defer” (this will put them in a @Defer folder), “ACTION” (this will put them in the @Action folder), etc.

I’d read a lot of good things while searching the web about this add-in. People raving at what a good help it is–how it streamlines their life. I was excited to try it.

I’m unimpressed with GTD for Outlook. The application doesn’t seem to be written by anyone who has ever read any of David Allen’s books. I’m surprised it even got his endorsement. Unlike the Franklin-Covey Planplus outlook add-in, there are no glaring bugs, but for $50, I would expect more than the application saving me the arduous chore of copying an email in my inbox to the @DEFER folder.

There is a short ebook for sale on the David Allen website GTD and Outlook(http://www.davidco.com) that tells you how to configure Outlook 2003 for maximum productivity. This will cost about $10, but you can probably find the same material on the web for free if you look hard enough. With this PDF, you can get Outlook working as well as you could with the GTD add-in but without cluttering you desktop with another add-in. The URL for this PDF is http://www.davidco.com/store/product.php?productid=16173&cat=0&page=1

So if you found this post because you were doing some product research prior to downloading (as I did), let me offer my opposing view to all the glowing posts I had read and tell you that I don’t think you need it.

So now I get the nag screen telling me to register for the next 10 days. I’m uninstalling. As with all outlook add-in uninstalls, I hope I don’t end up crashing my system.

Filed Under: GTD