GUI Design work involves a lot of mouse activity. Be more productive and reduce the strain by using keyboard alternatives where possible.
You can find most of the shortcut keys in the Help file by using the “Help | Keyboard Shortcuts” menu command.
Here’s a few more (some changed in version 3.5) that may not be listed in the help topic:
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GUI Design Studio version 3.5 is now available for immediate download. This is a maintenance release with some fixes and changes based on customer requests. It’s a free upgrade for all registered users.
For customers using any prior version of GUI Design Studio, simply install the new version and your existing licenses will continue to work.
Tree Icons
Until now, Tree elements have come with just a couple of basic sets of icons and the only way to change individual item icons was to place other icons on top.
That worked well until scrolling and item expansion/contraction functionality was added in version 3.3. After that, you needed to jump through a few hoops with components to get custom tree icons working properly.
Well, we’ve finally given Tree items their own icon property so you can now select them directly and everything works as it should. For convenience, the icon selector also keeps a record of the 10 most recent icons for fast, one-click selection.
Other Changes
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In the first part of this article we discussed the difference between functional and user interface prototypes. In this one we’ll discuss whether your prototype should have a role beyond the discovery and design phase.
People often talk about “Throwaway Prototypes” versus “Evolutionary Prototypes” and it’s very important to understand the difference and exactly what type you are creating before you begin.
Throwaway Prototypes
A Throwaway Prototype, as the name suggests, forms no part of the final application. Its purpose is to prove (or disprove) a design and get approval for actual implementation.
It can be produced using any quick and dirty technique and the quality can even be quite poor, so long as it satisfies the requirements of identifying what’s right about a design, what’s wrong and what’s missing.
Because of the speed at which Throwaway Prototypes can be put together and changed (usually on-the-fly), they encourage feedback and continual revision until the design is about right.
Because the effort required to produce them is relatively small, (more…)
For optimal usability in software design, there’s nothing more powerful than developing a laser targeted profile of the people who will be using it and discovering their particular needs and wants.
In the highly competitive smart phone market, a new breed of phones based on Google Android are doing just that, going head-to-head with the Apple iPhone.
Whether or not you’re interested in smart phone technology, this video, comparing the new HTC Hero with the iPhone 3GS (courtesy of PhoneDog.com), contains a great example of taking a specific user profile and creating a targeted user experience for them.
In many respects, the two phones are similar, but see how the folks developing the HTC Sense UI have focussed their efforts on provding a far superior interface for people who need to communicate through email and social media. This is a very specific (and growing) target market and a key distinction for HTC when the Hero lags behind the much more mature iPhone in many other areas.
Parts 2 and 3 of the review are less interesting from a user interface design and usability point of view as these are more concerned with performance and comparison of like-for-like application features.
However, it’s worth watching Part 2 from around the 7 minute mark for another great example of how the HTC keyboard interface and the spell checking facility has some really well thought out advantages over that of the iPhone.
From a hardware usability perspective, it’s interesting to note how the ‘chin’ of the HTC Hero causes the device to flip up when it’s placed on a flat surface and the buttons are pressed. This may have become an issue for early users because newer versions seem to have dispensed with the chin and adopted the more streamlined, flat form factor.
Did you know that you can change the behaviour of the mouse scroll wheel in the “File | Preferences” dialog in GUI Design Studio?
You can set it to zoom in and out or to scroll vertically. You can still get to the alternative function by holding down the Ctrl key. So if the wheel normally zooms, holding down the control key will scroll and vice versa.
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Whatever you’re pointing at when you zoom will remain fixed in position on screen so you can quickly point and zoom to focus in on any area of interest.
Don’t forget that if your mouse wheel tilts, this will scroll you horizontally, giving you full control over your view from that little wheel.