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The Alpha Software Forum Participation Guidelines

The Alpha Software Forum is a free forum created for Alpha Software Developer Community to ask for help, exchange ideas, and share solutions. Alpha Software strives to create an environment where all members of the community can feel safe to participate. In order to ensure the Alpha Software Forum is a place where all feel welcome, forum participants are expected to behave as follows:
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Bonus TIPS for Successful Posting

Try a Search First
It is highly recommended that a Search be done on your topic before posting, as many questions have been answered in prior posts. As with any search engine, the shorter the search term, the more "hits" will be returned, but the more specific the search term is, the greater the relevance of those "hits". Searching for "table" might well return every message on the board while "tablesum" would greatly restrict the number of messages returned.

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Let's discuss this.....

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    #16
    RE: Let's discuss this.....

    Well, look like I hit the nail on the head here.
    I find this a rather interesting discussion.

    Of course there is more to designing software then the technical part, that's obvious.
    But there is more then just the graphical part too.

    A further point of interest may be the way you position items on forms. I saw a lot of forms on the screen-thread that had many field in sight. One could also decide to make more use of A5's possibilities to avoid this, for instance by using conditional fields.
    In that way you can avoid that the user feels himself 'taken by surprise'once he glances at the form.

    I don't know how your experiences with users are, but it seems to be a more-and-more spoiled kind of person.
    He/she is interested to look at it at a glance, and there already decides wether your app is too difficult or not.
    You might disapprove of this (I do) but nevertheless that's what you are confronted with.
    So I always try to make things as easy as possible, avoid forms that are too filled with stuff, rather make it more then one form if necessary or use conditional fields.

    One thing about the colors:
    Indeed the color possibilities are a litte poor.
    Full pantone-support would be great, but, what do you know, we don't have it!
    I agree with this though.

    Last thing to enter in the discussion:
    Why on earth is A5 that static?
    Nothing moves there.......
    I mean, just guess what little use of Flash technology could do with any of your apps ???
    What do you think about that.....think about it, Flash technology menu's.......

    Looking forward to more contributions of any colleagues!

    Kind regards,

    Marcel

    Comment

      #17
      RE: Let's discuss this.....

      Paul,

      I second your opinion on limited color selection. In my application, I try to keep all of my layouts in soft earth tones. This gives me a rather limited selection of standard colors without going to hard, bright choices.

      I've added three colors for this purpose:
      249,221,189 Flesh
      241,238,211 Lighter Tan
      256,255,230 Pale Yellow-Tan

      There are two basic reasons why I want several colors within the same ballpark. First, I want to standardize certain button colors for certain basic actions as an indicator of what to expect (e.g. one color to bring a browse up, another to bring up a menu form, etc.). Secondly, I want the fly-over color to differ minimally from the foreground color - otherwise the flickering can put the user asleep.

      Steve

      Comment

        #18
        RE: Let's discuss this.....

        Robert,

        That is a wise (and probably true) point of view that I can second. "Why did you designed it in that way? " would be a good added question.

        I guess the design has to follow the target user group as well. Making software for kids launches totally different approaches as developing for (lets say) chemical analists.

        Kind regards,

        Marcel

        Comment

          #19
          RE: Let's discuss this.....

          Hi Steven,

          I have a good friend who I see on a weekly basis, who is a printing professional. I maintenance his computers from time to time and do some work for him to assist him as well if I can spare the time. In return, he learns me how to improve my graphic understanding and skills.

          From my experience I have learned to work with the same vision as you have. There are color-schemes which give you a good idea on which colors can go with eachother and which can not. And, I must say, that is not that obvious as it looks, there is a lot to be said about this.

          Soft colors often are -as I see it- the best choice.
          Hard colors can be chosen as a signalling function however.

          Kind regards,

          Marcel

          Comment

            #20
            RE: Let's discuss this.....

            This is a good thread.
            Personally I am extremely graphically challenged but have developed a more or less standard layout that I use, through much trial and error. (And I might add from seeing what others are doing on some of the posts here)

            When I started with A5, coming from A4, I thought WOW, now I can put all sorts of graphics on the forms and really jazz things up. Well it actually just slowed things down and didn't add to the usability. So now I use almost no graphics. Still an occasional one but only for a specific reason. I also have defined a few very light muted colors that I use. Users have to look at them all day and I don't want to wear out their eyes. The basic forms are still
            I have also found that keeping a main menu on the left edge of the screen at all times is helpful as users can access it from any form. I use nested menus, with in many cases 4 or 5 levels to get to a specific function but only if the top layer definition will lead the user to this lower level. Users can then click on close to back out through the menus or click on the X on the top right to bypass all the forms and go directly to the main menu.
            Users can also have multiple forms open and are given a button to toggle the window bar to make screen switching easy. I have attached a screenshot.
            I have enjoyed all the other comments, so keep em coming.

            Russ

            Comment

              #21
              RE: Let's discuss this.....

              I had a custom color along the lines you posted. Kind of a muted green

              193,209, 189

              I posted a screen shot that implemented this.

              Comment

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