Is there a way to create a wizard-like window in SketchFlow 4?
it needs the standard prev/next buttons, and of course the "Finish" button on the last page.
Are you having problems creating that? Sounds like a straightforward use of the prototyping features in SketchFlow. Simply link the sequence of screens together and use buttons with navigation behaviors to navigate between the screens.
I'm doing the same thing right now. We came at it two different ways - up to you which you prefer.
One is to use a TabControl and use the tabs as the steps of the wizard. This means you don't have to deal with adding the nav links back and forth, but you might have trouble getting the look you're hoping for.
The other way, as Chuck mentions, is just to essentially clone each step of the wizard screen as its own individual SketchFlow screen, with just the content section changed. Then you can link up each screen with the navigation hooks in the SketchFlow Map.
The latter is certainly more customizable, and once you get the hang of how to reuse sections of your design, tends to work better.
Related
I am new to windows phone (WP7) and to me it looks like everything on WP7 is about pages. I want a small window to pop up from the bottom of a page while staying on the same page. The small window will have some controls (like slider, list etc.). It should not behave like a modal dialog box though, i.e. the rest of the page (which is not covered by the small window) should still be active and user should be able to do something there. And I want to have a separate C# class which will handle the events from the controls on the small window.
This is very easy on iPhone, using view controllers, is there something similar on windows phone?
It sounds that it would make sense to make your "pop up" part of the page with the content it is intended to manipulate content on that page. If you want to encapsulate the functionality of the "pop up" you could make it a UserControl. If you went this route then animating it to slide onto the screen will be straightforward.
Windows Phone 7 typically uses an MVVM model compared to iPhone's MVC one for app structure. The direct comparison therefore isn't appropriate. WP7 also uses a very different design language to that of the iPhone and so a straight port of application design and layout is also unlikely to create a great experience on WP7.
I'd recommend taking some time to understanding the differences in the platforms and how your existing design would be best suited to recreation on WP7. Not only will this help you create a better experience on WP7 but enable to see if this your question actually relates to something you should be doing or not.
This very much sounds like something that goes against the nature of the platform, and the general design guidelines.
If you're providing some available configuration options to the user, you should do it on a separate page, so the user can change the settings there, approve it, and then be navigated back to the previous page.
However, if you really want to, you're talking about displaying a UserControl inside a Popup. But it wouldn't be a very good user experience, and confuse most users, as it doesn't follow the same look&feel as the rest of the platform.
My iPad app uses a splitView. Where should I stick a button to bring up an about dialog?
Thanks
It all really depends on your UI and where best it would look. I don't think there's any established rules on what should go where and stuff, aside from the Apple UI guidelines (which are pretty loose in terms of this stuff).
However, to give you a suggestion: assuming you're doing the basic Nav/Tableview for master and regular view for detail, you've got several options:
1) Toolbar along bottom of master for multiple buttons
2) rightBarButton of the navigation controller
3) Toolbar along the top of detail for multiple buttons
Experiment and see what you feel is best. Even better, see what your friends think is best. What you may think as intuitive can be confusing to someone new to your app.
There is no questions: UI-First Software Development. But what does it takes to do the UI first?
I started to build a website, a complicated one, and know I start to concern about the UI. Instead to start coding html+css, I decided to start with SkecthFlow. now, I'm very confused. Do I want to build a exact sketch? meaning to think about colors, fonts make sure that the button will look like a web link... etc, or just build the application sketch flow? meaning put a textboxes and buttons. Do I need to implement every thing in SketchFlow first?
I'm looking for best practice.
When I am doing wireframes, the goal is to NOT have the user/reviewer worry about colors/fonts/etc. but rather to have them focus on the details of the UI workflow/screen flow and specific types of controls they want to use. Even placement of the controls is secondary unless it impacts usability.
That's why SketchFlow comes with the style set that has the UI look like hand-drawn black and white chalkboard drawings.
Many non-programmers (and some programmers too) get hung up on colors, fonts and graphic design, which can suck up a bunch of time early in a project. All of that can easily be done later, when the functionality is all decided upon and in development.
I have a question about the windows mobile development.
I created a mobile form on the windows mobile 6.0 test project. But that example form slightly larger than the vertically normal pocketpc forms. I now everybody said you can press the scrollbar for accessing bottom or any location of the form.
But i need to use the finger for easy navigating form areas. This kind of iphone :)
Is it possible ? how can i make this ?
Windows Mobile 6.5 adds gesture support, that is supposed to allow such functionality for finger control. Of course, your code has to take advantage of it.
You can also write your own, which isn't difficult, but still cumbersome.
My answer could be classified as subjective. I try to now show the scroll bar when possible for just that reason. On most devices that have touch screen, you can scroll using you finger (and I'm a somewhat large guy -- 6'3" with farmer kid hands).
But if you are displaying a grid, that isn't always possible. The results can go off the screen very easily. Oh well, grab a pen and hit the scrollbar.
Other screen elements that can help: tab control. separate your controls into groups and put each group on a separate tab. I also do a lot of wizards with LARGE next and previous buttons.
But in all of this, if it is designed to be stylus free, just pray the user doesn't have to type anything using the screen soft keyboard. That just doesn't work with a finger.
which of the following styles do you prefer?
An application which to perform tasks opens new forms
An application which keeps the various "forms" in different tabs
An application which is based on a PageControl and shows you the right tab depending on what you want to do.
Something else
Also do you have any good links for gui design?
From a programmers point of view, the PageControl solution quickly gets out of hand. Possibly too much code and certainly to many components on one form. (Originally this question was tagged Delphi, so I go from there.)
From a users point of view, the "opens new window" paradigm often is confusing. We people tend to think that we are able to multitask and handle many open windows and tasks, but we are not (we task switch at a loss of time like computers and add loss of accuracy).
Obviously this really depends on the type of application. But I would tend to a paradigm as Chrome and Firefox show in their latest incarnations:
keep the various forms in different tabs
let the user detach a tab into its own form (dock and undock via drag%drop)
add a good way of navigation
I implement something like an SDI as main screen of an application too. Look at something like "outlook style". Navigation, list of objects, object details in different panes, some additional panes like a cockpit. And then open a new window/form for certain tasks (some modal, some non modal), but short lived. After the email is written, it is sent and closes the window. But I have, if I am capable of doing so, the possibility to work on multiple emails at the time.
Look at the problem. If it has dashboard character, take "outlook style" or so. If the users are a wide spread, heterogeneous, non computer savvy crowd, use SDI or forms on tabs. If you write for programmers, you might go for multiple forms, just because we tend to think that we can handle it. And it works for multiple screens (hopefully).
MDI is the worst choice possible, in my opinion. There's nothing I hate more than having to resize a bunch of windows, or tile them or whatever.
Tabs are bad, too, especially if you have more than one row of them (or if you have one row but still have more tabs than will fit, and have to use some funky scrollbar or "more" button with them).
I would rather see the programmer think about the problem and just show me what I need to see based on what I'm doing as a user. Implementing the different user interfaces in your programs as user controls (as opposed to discrete forms) and then showing them or hiding them based on the current context is the way to go.
The Tabbed form is a good idea if you use a frame for each tab content. This keeps you out of trouble from getting too much code in one single form unit. Try to do the same as Google Chrome. I personally create a menu with the options that are actually frames that loads only when the user asks for it, so there will never be many tabs visible unless the user needs them all opened.