Interface Design Thoughts

Posted on:May 13 2011

Designing interfaces for software is hard, especially if your software again is for designing interfaces. :) I'm not a fan of modal dialogs and message boxes, so a lot of stuff in my products CopperCube and WebsitePainter tries to avoid these, in the hope of making the product simpler to use. Recently, I wanted to add a 'Navigation Menu' element to WebsitePainter, and thought about an interface to edit it. Navigation menus are complicated beasts, and it's difficult to provide an easy way to change them. The best solution for this I came across is the forms editor in Visual Studio. So I went a similar way, and the result was this:


No dialog, no tree control, no property window, no context menu to edit the menu. Simply type in the view where you see it. Nice. The nice side effect is also that you can easily set the font and text color of each single item directly in the editor and see the change immediately, and even change the style of each entry individually. It was quite a lot of work to extend the WebsitePainter editor with all the features needed for this, but I think it was worth it.
I still have to test and tweak it a bit, but this will be available in the next update of WebsitePainter.





Comments:


WYSIWYG FTW!
Who need Dreamweaver anyway?
I've been searching for a good visual HTML editor for ages, and in the end I always returned to the text-editors. WebsitePainter was cool in the beginning. Now I can't even think of a features that's still missing :)
Great work!
Telepath
Quote
2011-05-13 10:46:00


Now that's true WYSIWYG! Less is more.
Lenx
Quote
2011-05-13 17:51:00


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