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User Interface design ideas?

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    User Interface design ideas?

    I have been working with Alpha 5 for a few moths now. I am just about finished up an extensive application for our internal usage. Alpha has been ROCK SOLID, and very fast. I have been very impressed with the product, and most of all the information and help available here. This forum in my opinion is second to none. My only issue with Alpha, is with the user interface. I find the interface is a little archaic. It should not matter, but unfortunately how it looks is equally as important as functionality and stability. Has anyone seen or developed a modern "slick" interface for some design ideas?

    Thanks,

    -----------------------------
    Steven McLean
    Cook & Company
    Barristers and Solicitors
    20 Regan Rd #1
    Brampton, ON L7A 1C3
    [email protected]
    _______________________________
    Steven McLean
    i3 Home Inspections
    [email protected]

    #2
    Re: User Interface design ideas?

    Hi Steven,

    That's a tough question and one that has been thrown around here for sure.

    Here is a link that you might not be aware exists for some ideas.

    http://www.alphadzine.com/commerce.cgi

    Also, the examples provided by Amanita in this thread show what is possible with some effort.


    Regards,

    Jeff

    Comment


      #3
      Re: User Interface design ideas?

      Steve,

      It is heartening that Alpha is focused, driven to improve the function/substance of Alpha Five. The package is clearly amazing.

      What I have found so disappointing is that they place much less effort on the form of what their product can do. In short, design and appearance issues get short shrift.

      And this problem is further compounded because new users seem to emulate Alpha's designs, which can lead to crude, amateurish looking applications.

      Don't take my word for it: take a look at any of the applications users submitted several months back in a contest to showcase Alpha. The winner was a minister, if I remember correctly. When I looked at his application, I saw basically a one-off one, one that met his needs but would never, no never find shelf space at Best Buy. It and the others that I looked at, cried out for makeovers: fixing line spacing, alignment, gridding, color, use of gradients, fonts, sizes, etc. all the basics.

      So I would not hold my breadth hoping for better design from Alpha. They are not Filemaker, which is both good and bad. But I can't tell you how many Filemaker applications that I have seen that have more curb appeal that what I find with Alpha.

      The best we can do is to lobby for Alpha not to foreclose design decisions for us. In my mind this means allowing a developer to customize ALL icons for starters; there are simply too many in the Alpha portfolio that as another forum member has characterized, "look like shit".

      Another thing that they need to address is the alignment of everything they create automatically as XDialogs. Why can they not left align fields in XDialog, when I can do it so easily for an Alpha desktop form?

      Bottom line I think is this: Alpha is a tech weanie company; they went public once and reverted back to private ownership when it became clear that Alpha would never be a mass market product. The product generates a nice income for its owners, and has a loyal, if small, group of users. I get the sense that ego may play a large role in this and for the two years I have been exploring the product, I don't see much interest in bringing in first class design talent to bring Alpha up to date.

      While I have seen lots of Filemaker applications that strike me as polished, professional, commercial, and saleable, I hope forum users won't be pissed at me, but I have yet to see even one written with Alpha Five.

      Alpha is improving, but I know am fairly certain, that it's just not in their genes or will to have really great looking logo, web page, package design, etc. That being the case, why would you expect more of the product itself?

      I would like Alpha to see its mission as providing an architecture to develop cutting edge applications. And I mean architecture in the building construction sense. Designing a structure that is strong, serviceable and mets its owners needs and objectives and that is pleasing to the eye and senses in its uses of color, texture, mass, shadow, elevation, etc.

      In sum, I don't have very high expectations of Alpha any more; that way, when they actually do something that is well designed, I can be pleasantly surprised.


      Bob McGaffic
      Pittsburgh, PA

      Any home remodelers out there? Take a look at a 20.00 book published last year on Amazon.com titled Get Your House Right: Architectural Elements to Use and Avoid, (Prince Charles wrote the preface). After thumbing through its pictures, the lightbulb might go off once or twice as to why a certain placement or alignment of doors and windows works much better than others or how to space columns for a front porch, etc. Similar principles are appropriate to application and form design.

      Comment


        #4
        Re: User Interface design ideas?

        Steven,

        I agree, it would be great if Alpha inherently allowed us to create "modern" looking and feeling user interfaces...however,

        It is possible (as shown in the prior responses to your post) to achieve some pretty impressive results.

        We're on the verge of the release of v10. The attached screen shot was created using v5 way back in 2002 or 2003. This was even before gradients were available.

        Granted, there are other products available that might meet your U/I desires, but I doubt you will find the power and flexibility of Alpha not to mention the value of this forum with those products.

        Louis

        Comment


          #5
          Re: User Interface design ideas?

          I'm still fairly new to Alpha Five. I've been working with Visual Foxpro for the last 10 years.

          Visual Foxpro suffers from the same problem of a rather mundane appearance to it's UI controls. However, the one thing they did to overcome this was allow you to create your own class elements by combining some of the core controls that allow you to put your stamp on your application.

          What you end up with is reusable controls via custom classes that allow you to design all your applications to have "your" look and feel. Of course, depending on how much time you want to spend, you can get as fancy as you'd like and emulate any software design that you'd like. And as you would expect, 3rd party developers would create UI elements that you incorporate in your applications if you didn't want to spend the time creating them yourself.

          While I thing a good UI design is extremely appealing, generally it comes down to function over form.

          I know when I first started creating commercial applications with VFP, the UI was pretty plain. As time passed, I tended to spend more and more time changing the UI without changing the function to make it more appealing to more users.

          It would be great if the UI was modern and flexible so that you could incorporate those elements that most users want and yet tweak it just enough to make it unique. Having compared some of the UI controls in Alpha to VFP, I would have to agree that some of the Alpha controls could certainly use some updating, even though the function is somewhat easier to implement in Alpha.

          At this point, I wonder if the enhancements to the desktop development side of Alpha have been put on the back burner as everyone seems to be focused on moving apps to the cloud?
          John J. Fatte', CPA
          PRO-WARE, LLC
          Omaha, NE 68137

          Comment


            #6
            Re: User Interface design ideas?

            While I thing a good UI design is extremely appealing, generally it comes down to function over form
            I agree with you on this. While I have no predisposed ideas that any of my apps will be on the shelf at Best Buy as Bob put it. I know....that is not my market. I am building large scale custom apps for industrial clients. The app needs to look decent but most users of my app want a LOT of data on one screen so they don't have to go to multiple places to see the data that is important to them. That being said, in my world there has to be a tradeoff between form and function....not purely the design.

            I will say that while I am no graphic designer...I did purchase the icon set Bob (Thanks BTW Bob!) mentioned in another post by Glyph Labs. The use of these icons alone made BIG difference in the professionalism and appearance of my apps.

            Regards,

            Jeff

            Comment


              #7
              Re: User Interface design ideas?

              One of the hardest things to overcome with Alpha is the inability to place transparent icons. You have to modify the icon with this "Barney" purple background in order to place it and a lot of times that doesn't work out to well anyway. As a result, I have to utilize a lot of white backgrounds in order to accommodate the icons.

              What I have done with my apps is examine shareware with a user interface that I like and try to emulate it in Alpha.

              HOWEVER... Some things I would love to see:
              - Left frame menu with Outlook style accordion controls.
              - Left frame menu with Tree style.

              (Ok.. so you can the left frame menus with xdialog but frankly it's a pain in the butt... You can create these in VB in minutes)

              - Office 2007 style menu ribbon.

              - GRAPHICAL CALENDAR!!! - Why can this this small db company, www.brilliantdatabase.com do it but not Alpha?

              - Grouped browse records! (again, Brilliant Database can do it).

              Item A
              Item a1
              Item a2

              Comment


                #8
                Re: User Interface design ideas?

                A while back, we had a thread where people submitted screen shots of various forms. That showed quite a diversity of user interface.

                Try this.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: User Interface design ideas?

                  Steve,

                  Thanks for the link to a rather long compendium of Alpha Five user application menus.

                  Did you have a chance to look at the Brilliant applications suggested by JP above?

                  If you do, hopefully you will see what we're trying to communicate here.
                  The Brilliant demos can largely be replicated in Alpha Five -- with the exception of easy to use tree menus driven from data tables.

                  What distinguishes the Brilliant demos from the Alpha examples is good alignment, good use of color, modern tab controls, with just a few fonts and sizes, good alignment, etc. Alpha developers get carried away with Alpha's capabilities and the result is that their applications look terribly un-commercial.

                  So after reviewing the Alpha examples, let me say that I know you can set the background color of every friggin button on your form to a different color -- but don't do it!!! Your application development project should not be a contest to see how many different control properties you can customize.

                  For simple menu structures, Alpha Five developers might want to emulate the Microsoft Access Switchboard. Again it offers better design than just throwing a couple of buttons on a form, which is what was the case is several of the link's examples.

                  Bob McGaffic
                  Pittsburgh, PA
                  Last edited by rmcgaffic; 07-01-2009, 04:04 PM.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: User Interface design ideas?

                    I agree with the thread to some degree but find that most of the time people who use the apps just want them to work well and have the app flow... they don't really really care if it looks fancy. Here's an app I'm working on... it looks decent... I hope... let me know if you think it's appauling. It's simple but the design works and doesn't get in the way.

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: User Interface design ideas?

                      Not appauling (I can't spell either :)) but it would be appalling if that is Marie's real name and address.

                      Raymond Lyons

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: User Interface design ideas?

                        Originally posted by Davidk View Post
                        I agree with the thread to some degree but find that most of the time people who use the apps just want them to work well and have the app flow... they don't really really care if it looks fancy. Here's an app I'm working on... it looks decent... I hope... let me know if you think it's appauling. It's simple but the design works and doesn't get in the way.
                        I hate to disagree with you on this but the people who usually USE the software are not usually not the ones who BUY the software. Try doing a demo with a ho-hum app.

                        A great example is my brother, who manages a large call center operation for a major company. He was part of a group of managers who had to decide on a new app for the call center. When I asked him why he chose the one he did, the first thing out of his mouth is that it looked better (i.e. aesthetics). He said the icons and "user friendliness" won him over. He doesn't really use the software, per say... he just goes in and gets his reports.

                        Now as far as Brilliant Database is concerned, this is a desktop database app that has only a fraction of the power that the Alpha 5 backend has. I used a previous version to create a catalog for one company and maintain a supplier database for another.

                        Now check out what features they included in their recent releases: calendar and browse grouping (among other things).

                        People still want to create desktop apps!

                        Comment


                          #13
                          Re: User Interface design ideas?

                          But this is the problem, and always has been, with people who buy the software as opposed to the people who use the software. The enlightened companies get users to test drive candidates and arrive at a conclusion agreed upon by majority. The problem companies choose a product and shoe-horn their users into it... you always wind up sitting a PC saying who the hell chose this crap that I'm forced to use.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            Re: User Interface design ideas?

                            Regarding the
                            Now check out what features they included in their recent releases: calendar and browse grouping
                            --

                            Agreed an incorporated calendar based scheduler would be great to have...I am curious as to what has been created by some as, if there have been, they have been fairly quiet....would like to see screenshots of any that emulate what has been talked about fairly frequently here.

                            The browse grouping also would be great to have pre-made within Alpha as a choice....but is doable even in version 8 via xbasic. Am working on one now (when I can) that will show and collapse via "+" and "-" type tree buttons within the browse. And yes, it will sub-total and total within the browse.

                            Having these features automatically done in Alpha would be quite an asset though.
                            Mike
                            __________________________________________
                            It is only when we forget all our learning that we begin to know.
                            It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.
                            Henry David Thoreau
                            __________________________________________



                            Comment


                              #15
                              Re: User Interface design ideas?

                              this is a main page where a jpg in the app folder can be changed to accomodate the company picture.

                              The second pic is of the Buyer information screen(no it is not tabs)

                              Hope it helps someone. It has been accepted in the type business it was designed for.

                              .
                              Dave Mason
                              [email protected]
                              Skype is dave.mason46

                              Comment

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