Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

[CALocklin]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Re: Should it look "sexy/modern" or should it "just work".

It depends on what it's being used for:

- If it will be seen by your customers - i.e., most websites - it should probably be sexy/modern and work. In this case, it's probably worth the cost to your client to make it look good because it will help sell the product.

- If it will only be used internally, make it work.

For internal projects, I tell my customers that (a) making it "modern and sexy" will add a significant amount to the cost and possibly slow down screen refreshes - especially if any remote access is required - and (b) if they want it to really look "modern and sexy" they will have to find someone who is a good artist to tell me what it should look like because I got kicked out of art class in grade school. (But I did great in drafting.) If someone tells me what they want it to look like, I can do it that way - just don't ask me to create the design.

For some strange reason nobody has wanted to spend extra money to make an internal job "modern and sexy" as long as it is reasonably neat and easy to use. ("not modern and sexy" <> "messy and unorganized")

[rleunis]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Ron,

With all due respect, I totally disagree.

All clients want the same thing. Sexy, Appealing, Working websites and app faces. Things have changed in the web design departments in just 5 years.

I cannot blame a company for wanting it, because I want it when I pay for a website for the dealership. I don't really care how they do it, just do it. Most of the websites we use are canned, then altered some to suit taste.

.

Alpha has nothing to do with appearance. You create the look and feel. And you can create the sexiest appealing websites with Alpha5...

I am not saying not to make appealing sites, what I am saying is that if you cannot convince a client it has nothing to do with Alpha, it is a lost case...(or it's your problem not being able to convince.)

Alpha can be used to satisfy any flavour of appeal... It all depends on how creative you are..

Anyway: give me your definition what you regard as sexy...I am pretty sure Alpha can cope with whatever what appeals to you or your client.

The original question of this thread was:

"My customer thinks that Alpha looks "dated" and "not sexy" ".

Please explain some more what this client means...
For sure it has nothing to do with the sites/screens you can make with alpha5.

regards, Ron

[NoeticCC]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

All clients want the same thing. Sexy, Appealing, Working websites and app faces. Things have changed in the web design departments in just 5 years.

I cannot blame a company for wanting it, because I want it when I pay for a website for the dealership.

Yep design does make a BIIIG impression, but with CSS and especially with the new CSS and style libraries developed for the AJAX samples, and with a bit of a flair for style and colour, you can make an Alpha5 site look just as great as any other website.

A developer/programmer does not always have the right feel for or desire to primarily design pretty things in the first place. They may want to make stuff that works and works well and speedily, and as I have experienced myself, end up looking "down" on so-called "designers" who create bloated bits of prettiness with no real purpose or practicality/functionality...

...but that doesn't mean a developer who doesn't also have design skills can't work WITH a designer to develop a website that is stunningly pretty AND works and integrates beautifully with your internal SQL or DBF-based database....

[glenschild]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Does this count?

website

The scoreboard on the left hand side of the page (which uses ajax for score refreshes) is updated directly from Alpha 5 v9 Desktop using active table links to the back end MySQL tables!

[NoeticCC]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Here are some screen shots of an application that our company uses.

Very nice :)

[NoeticCC]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Does this count?

website

The scoreboard on the left hand side of the page (which uses ajax for score refreshes) is updated directly from Alpha 5 v9 using active table links to the back end MySQL tables!

Nice one - although it might be faster to just grab the data from mySQL directly, rather than slowing things down by using Active Link tables...

But you illustrate the point I made very well - apart from a few exceptions like Flash, which is not user friendly (not allowing customers to copy & paste things like email addresses or phone numbers from your website is not really something I feel makes you all that popular, but that's just me and m opposition to all-style-no-substance, pretty-pretty design without the functionality that even a plain HTML site provides...), there is nothing other development environments can do that you can't do, design- or layout wise, in Alpha 5.

But unlike other data-driven solutions (A friend recently bemoaned the lack of flexibility in Sharepoint websites for example, you gotta use the format, layout etc. provided and that's that), if the built-in web components don't do things the way you like (and the custom controls go a long way towards bending a web grid into whatever functionality you require), you can use Xbasic code in the .a5w pages themselves, buit-in database connectivity and manipulation functions as well as the extensive AJAX libraries, to custom--write a web app any which way you like...

The main point you have illustrated is this though: A site's design and layout are something that can be customized to a very detailed level, you can set up tables to have rounded corners, use fancy images, fonts, background images etc. etc. on almost any website, no matter what it is designed in and run on... and while in theory, some web development solutions come with much more fancy, "sexy" design templates that require 0 design skills from the developer, in practice a commercial client who is keen on a sexy, slick interface is hardly going to be satisfied with a website that uses the same design as several other out of the box sites out there....

[NoeticCC]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Wha do you mean? Did it make you puke? It couldn't be that bad?

Hm... after that post I watched it exxpecting some sort of funny thing to happen... (e.g. eating, then spitting food all over the monitor etc.) not sure why the warning would be required!!!

[rmcgaffic]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

Graeme,

I think your client needs to understand the difference betwen art direction and design.

Yes, Alpha Five allows you to incorporate bitmaps into your forms and web pages. And so you can plop down any stock or custom photograph or use a predefined template and someone people will say "gee, what an attractive application". They are of course responding to the bitmap not the design of the application.

To me the design of your application refers to its menu structure, its consistent and correct use use of controls and their properties as well as the flexibility to customize the controls. And unfortunately, I find many of the examples offered by Alpha and forum members as "good design" to be very, very weak. Tab controls should not be used for menu structures, for example.

I look a little bit deeper at the quality of the controls available in the Toolbox for use in designing your application. My experience is that some in A5 are very good and others are dreadful.

You need to understand that many Alpha Controls are only available to you if you wish to master XDialog, which you requires in code to specify the appearance of your form. I find that this approach violates my sensibilities for WYSIWYG.

For many controls, instead of placing a control on your form and then setting the forms properties, making the settings you wish, you have to specify it all in code.

If you are coming from a visual design tool like Access or Visual Studio make sure you understand this difference. Only the controls that appear on the toolbox are easily changed without custom coding.

Note that most of the supercontrols in the demo have extensive coding behind them. The Accordian supercontrol allows a hierarchical menu of only two levels and must all be written in code. I prefer to use a third party ActiveX control and populate values from my database and not hardcode everything.

Many of the controls lack properties that you may take for granted. It is true that a Tree Control is available on the toolbar, but you can not there specify its background color, its font, font color, etc. I had to resort to a third party ActiveX Tree control to achieve the look I wanted. Yes you can have any background color as long as its white!.

The browse control is actually quite good and I have been able to achieve a fairly attractive appearance with the careful settings of its properties. If you are reviewing Alpha Sports demo application, this is probably one of the most amateurish designs, and I can see how it could really turn off your client.

Alpha's native icons are somewhat weak, very small and overly detailed. The good news is you can replace them wholesale.

Alpha's tab control is 10 years behind the times. While the A5 itself uses, a square edge/curved edge tab (like Office 2007) to display open forms at the bottom of the screen, Alpha does not allow YOU to use this very attractive tab control. Instead you are stuck with sometime that looks like it came out of Visual Basic 4.0 of fifteen years ago.

I just recently encountered another snafu. Most application tools offer a slider control, using the user to move from 0% to 100%. Alpha Five calls this a trackbar.
You can not place this control on a form. You can only write code to do it. Do a documentation search for trackbar to look at Alpha's result, which is unacceptably crude. Then compare the visual quality with that possible with other third party activeX controls, which allow you to change the background color, the symbol used as the pointer, its color, etc. Why am even using a slider control in my application?

Alpha Five does not offer a splitter control which allows you to enlarge the left side of your screen and reduce the right side of your screen, you guessed it without code.
With other tools you place a slider bar on a form, place the subforms or bitmaps on either side and execute it. This is especially useful if you want a menu structure on the left side of your screen whose width you want to allow the user to change.

I had to drop the idea of using a splash screen in my application because Alpha was not able to display a background bitmap with an even border around it (incredible), and does not permit images that are bled (like a magazine cover) with no border.

To get the appearance I want in my application, almost at every turn I have had to develop a "workaround". If it hadn't been for the excellent user support on this forum, I would have abandoned Alpha Five months ago. Very slowly I am achieving the visual result I want, but it has not been easy.

If you do a forum search for postings under my name, I think you will get a realistic picture of the challenges of well designing an A5 application.

Bottom line, you and your client need to understand your requirements, at a minimum, for the following controls:
Tree
Tab
Browse
Button
Splitter/Slider. These are the workhorses of any application. You need to understand the degree to which you wish to change the visual appearance of these as well then evaluate whether native A5 will do the job.

I have had to resort to third party ActiveX controls from such supplier's as dbi-tech, codejock, fms to get a polished appearance.


Bob McGaffic
Pittsburgh

PS

I have found these books to be valuable resources in designing an applicaiton that is easy to work with and attractive in appearance.

GUI bloopers: Dont's and Do's for Software Developers and Web designers by Jeff Johnson. This has plenty of Thumbs up and Thumbs down illustrations to solve common design problems.

Designing Interfaces by Jenifer Tidwell

The Essential Guide to User Interface Design: An introduction to GUI Design Principles and Techniques by Wilbert O. Galitz

About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design by Alan Cooper ("Father of Visual Basic").

[Richard Rabins]

Re: Need your help to find best - looking Alpha Application or web site

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