As we know, several modern applications (IE9, Firefox 4, Chrome, Paint.NET, etc.) use DwmExtendFrameIntoClientArea for the Aero glass effect.
What type of applications should you really use this for, though? For browsers I can understand minimizing as much extraneous space as possible, but really, what's the point? Why not just create the window without a frame (like Google Chrome does when DWM is not present)? I'm just looking for some rough guidelines on what type of applications should use this effect and when.
Well, as this is purely a visual eye-candy type of thing, you're asking more for subjective opinion than anything else. First, check out the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines, though.
Personally, I like Outlook 2010, where the tab labels are on a glass background - I like the background image on my desktop (or windows behind) seeping through. I think it gives the impression that the window is not taking up quite so much of my workspace. I also love Chrome and it's use of glass for tab space.
I don't like windows media player where the controls are on glass - it makes them seem busy on a busy background. I also don't like the Add Gadget window, where the whole thing is glass (although more blurry) for the same reason.
So pick your design ideals and keep it consistent. My personal pick is to allow glass to come in on windows aspects that are mostly text and uniform, and not the main focus of interaction. On things that are "busy" and are high interaction areas, I dislike having glass behind.
Related
Well, the title almost says it all : Why should I not move a GUI (e.g. Gtk) window on screen from the code ? In Gtk 3 there was an API for moving windows on screen, but it was removed in Gtk 4, because it is not good to move a window from code; only the user should do so (don't ask me to provide sources for that, I read it somewhere but have forgotten where and cannot find it). But I cannot think of any reason why it shouldn't be good, but of several reasons why it could be good, for example to restore the position of a window between application restarts. Could you please shed some light on this ?
The major reason why is that it can't possibly work cross-platform, so it is broken API by definition. That’s also why it was removed in GTK4. For example: this is impossible to implement when running on top of a Wayland session, since the protocol doesn't allow getting/setting global coordinates. If you still want to have something similar working, you'll have to call the specific platform API (for example, X11) for those platforms that you want to support.
On the reason why it’s not supported by some display protocols: it’s bad for UX and security. In terms of UX: some compositors can have special behavior because they need to work on a small device, or because they have a kiosk mode in which everything should always run fullscreen, or they provide a tiling experience. Applications positioning their windows themselves then tend to give unexpected behaviour. In terms of security: if you allow this, it’s technically possible for an application to reposition and resize itself so that it covers your screens while making itself transparent, without it being noticeable, which means it has the possibility of scraping all input.
I am debating whether to hide or not to hide the system tray in a Windows Phone 7 application. I've not found any general suggestions on this issue -the official Windows Phone design guidelines don't address this issue at all - except for Jeff Wilcox's blog post who suggested that he personally likes to see the system tray in applications. I'd like some general advice on this issue from other Windows Phone developers.
Some reasons for showing the system tray are
Doesn't take up that much space
Users may want to see it at times
Reasons for hiding it are
You can't control its background: unless you're using PhoneBackgroundBrush as the background the top row will stand out
Lots of widely used / official apps already hide it: all games as well as the official Facebook and Twitter app.
I'd appreciate all advice on this.
Transparency and colors are now possible with Mango by setting its BackgroundColor and Opacity :
shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="True"
shell:SystemTray.BackgroundColor="Transparent"
shell:SystemTray.Opacity="0"
I would say by default show it unless it really gets in the way in a way you can't workaround, especially if its an app and not a game.
I would say it depends on the application/game you are writing
If the app needs a network connection or if you will be in the application for a long period of time show it so the user can keep an eye on network and battery.
If you need the extra screen space (for a game?), and you rarely need network hide it.
Or... I guess you leave it up-to the user and give them a setting to programatically hide/show it.
I think its best to use the tray in applications that are tools or utilities. Typically these users would prefer more info than less when they're using applications on the phone (battery, network, time).
Also adding the tray in there tends to make the application look more native on the phone (according to me and others I've asked), which is a big plus because the user associates your app as if it was built with the phone OS.
But if the application is a game, media, etc. type of application I recommend you take it off, especially on panorama because it takes away from the intended design. Also these types of applications focus on the content and seeing multiple little icons at the top can take away from the experience.
Really to me the space it occupies isn't really THAT much, so that shouldn't be too much of an issue. But rather the purpose of the app as stated above.
I do like the suggestions that have been given as far as giving the user the choice. Check out this code:
bool ShowTray;
//ASK USER WHAT THEY WANT
//ShowTray = true or false;
SystemTray.IsVisible = ShowTray;
I've been reluctantly hiding, at least on any view where I have a background image; otherwise it looks too strange to me. I've been considering a setting in my app that would allow the user to choose, and persisting that to isolated storage.
Also considering maybe having the top of the screen in phone background brush color and have it fade / blend into another color or background image. Not sure how well that would turn out but as long as it is not a cheesy looking gradient effect, perhaps.
I'm hoping eventually MS will soon add support for transparency in the system tray or otherwise help address this issue. As a user I wish that I could force the system tray to always be visible across all apps, but as a developer I realize that the visual effect often doesn't look good.
Perhaps if the community came up with a new UX metaphor where maybe double-tapping in the system tray area would toggle whether it is visible. A single tap could perhaps start to animate / pop / hint at the system tray...
In Vista and later, if an app becomes unresponsive, the Desktop Window Manager is able to handle redrawing it when necessary (move a window over it, drag it around, etc.) because it has kept a pixel buffer for it. Windows also tries to detect when an app has become unresponsive after some timeout, and tries to make the best of the situation -- I believe it dims out the window, adds "Not Responding" to its title bar, and perhaps some other effects.
Now, we have a skinned app that uses window regions and layered windows, and it doesn't play well with these effects. We've been developing on XP, but have noticed a strange effect when testing on Vista. At some points the app may spend a few moments on some calculation or callback, and "if a message has not been retrieved within 5 seconds, the DWM declares the window to be hung" (MSDN - Preventing Hangs in Windows Applications). It seems that when this kicks in, a strange graphical problem occurs: any pixels that would be 100% transparent due to the window regions turn black, which effectively makes the window rectangular again, with a black background. There seem to be other anomalies, with the original window's pixels being shifted a bit in some child dialogs.
I am working on reducing such delays (ideally Windows will never need to step in like this), and trying to maintain responsiveness while it's busy, but I'd still like to figure out what is causing it to render like that, as I can't guarantee I can eliminate all delays.
Basically, I just would like to know what Windows is doing when this happens, and how I can make my app behave properly with it. Skinned apps have to still work on Vista and later, so I need to figure out what I'm doing that's non-standard. I don't even know exactly how to look for information into how Windows now handles unresponsive apps, as my searches only return people having issues with apps that are unresponsive, or very rudimentary explanations of what the DWM does with such apps. Heck I'm not even 100% sure it's the DWM responsible, but it seems likely. Any potential leads?
Photo of problem; screen shots won't capture the effect (note that the white dialog's buffer is shifted -- it is shifted exactly by the distance it has been offset from the main (blue) window):
This is standard behavior; you can also notice it in Office 2007 / 2010 when they freeze.
I have found that it is called 'ghosting' when it does this, and it was introduced in XP (though it seems DWM takes it a step further since it keeps track of every app's pixels). It is possible to disable it for the duration of your app's life with DisableProcessWindowsGhosting(). Some folks say that it is not recommended, but considering how badly it plays with layered windows, the downsides of turning it off are negligible. I've tested it and it does precisely what it claims; now if the server takes a little longer than expected to return, it won't mangle the entire interface.
If there is a better way to get my layered windows to work with Vista/7's handling of ghosting without disabling it outright, I'd certainly still be interested, but I'll probably just accept this as the answer otherwise.
I think there are basically two things that will help with this:
First, like you've been doing, try not to hang in the first place: do as little heavy lifting in UI threads as possible.
Second, don't use multiple top-level windows to implement what the user is meant to see as just one; instead, do the compositing yourself. That will prevent the layers from being moved out-of-sync from one another.
I'm from a Windows programming background when writing tools, but have been programming using Carbon and Cocoa for the past year. I have introduced myself to Mac by, I admit it, hiding from UI programming. I've been basically wapping my OpenGL code in a view, then staying in my comfort zone using my platform agnostic OpenGL C++ code as usual.
However, now I want to start porting one of my more sophisticated applications to Mac OS.
Typically I use the standard Visual Studio dockable MDI approach, which is excellent, but very Windows-like. From using a Mac primarily now for a while, I don't tend to see this sort of method used for Mac UIs. Even Xcode doesn't support the idea of drag and drop/dockable views, unfortunately. I see docked views with splitter panels, but that's about it.
The closest thing I've seen to the Visual Studio approach is Photoshop CS4, which is pretty nice.
So what is the general consensus on this? Is there are more Mac-like way of achieving the same thing that I haven't seen? If not, I'm happy to write a window manager in Cocoa myself, so that I can finally delve in an learn what looks like an excellent API.
Note, I don't want to use QT or any other cross-platform libraries. The whole point is that I want to make a Mac app look like a Mac app, leave the Windows app looking like a Windows app. I always find the cross-platform libraries tend to lose this effect, and when I see a native Mac UI, with fancy Cocoa transitions and animations, I always smile. It's also a good excuse for me to learn Cocoa.
That being said, if there is an Open Source Cocoa library to do this, I'd love to know about it! I'd love to see how someone else achieves this, and would help smooth the Cocoa learning curve.
Cheers,
Shane
UPDATE: I forgot to mention a critical point. I support plugins, which can have their own UI to display various plugin specific information. I don't know which plugins will be loaded and I don't know where their UI will live, if I don't support docking. I'd love to hear people's thoughts on this, specifically: How do I support a plugin view architecture, if the UI can't change? Where do I put the plugin views?
Coming from a Windows background, you feel the need to have docking windows, but is it really essential to the app? Apple's philosophy (in my opinion) is that the designer knows better than the user how things should look and work. For example, iTunes is a pretty sophisticated app, but it doesn't let you change the UI around, change the skin, etc., because Apple wants to keep it consistent. They offer the full view, the mini player, and a handful of different viewing options, but they don't let you pull the source list off into a separate window, or dock it in other positions. They think it should be on the left, so there it stays...
You said you "want to make a Mac app look like a Mac app", and as you pointed out, Mac apps don't tend to have docking windows. Therefore, implementing your own docking windows is probably a step in the wrong direction ;)
+1 to Ken's answer.
From a user perspective unless its integral to the app like it is in Adobe CS or Eclipse i want everything as concise as possible and all the different options and displays out of my way so i can focus on the document.
I think you will find with mac users that those who have the "user skill" to make use of rearranging panels will in most cases opt for hot key bindings instead, and those who dont have that level of "skill" youre just going to confuse.
I would recommend keeping it as simple as possible.
One thing that's common among many Mac apps is the ability to hide all the chrome and focus on your content. That's the point behind the "tic tac" toolbar control in the top right corner of many windows. A serious weakness of many docking UIs is that they expect you to have the window take up most of the screen, because the docked panels can obscure content. Even if docked panels are collapsable, the space left by them is often just wasted and filled with white space. So, if you build a docking panel into your interface, you should expect it to be visible most of the time. For example, iTunes' source list is clearly designed to be visible all the time, but you can double-click a playlist to open it in a new window.
To get used to the range of Mac controls, I'd suggest you try doing some serious work with some apps that don't have a cross-platform UI; for example, the iWork apps, Interface Builder or Preview. Take note of where controls appear and why—in toolbars, in bottom bars, in inspectors, in source lists/sidebars, in panels such as IB's Library or the Font and Color panels, in contextual HUDs. Don't forget the menu bar either. Get an idea of the feel of controls—their responsiveness, modality, sizing, grouping and consistency. Try to develop some taste—not everything is perfect; just try iCal if you want to have something to make fun of.
Note that there's no "one size fits all" for controls, which can be an issue with docking UIs. It's important to think about workflow: how commonly used the control would be, whether you can replace it with direct manipulation, whether a visible indication of its state is necessary, whether it's operable from the keyboard and mouse where appropriate, and so forth. Figure out how the control's placement and behavior lets the user work more efficiently.
As a simple example of example of a good versus bad control placement and behavior in otherwise-decent applications, compare image masking in OmniGraffle and Keynote. In OmniGraffle, this uses the Image inspector where you have to first click on an unlabeled button ("Natural size") in order to enable the appropriate controls, then adjust size and position away in a low-fidelity fashion with an image thumbnail or by typing percentages into fields. Trying to resize the frame directly behaves in a bizarre and counterintuitive fashion.
In Keynote, masking starts with a sensibly named menu item or toolbar item, uses a HUD which pops up the instant you click on a masked image and allows for direct manipulation including a sensible display of the extent of the image you're masking. While you're dragging a masked image around, it even follows the guides. Advanced users can ignore the HUD entirely, just double-clicking the image to toggle mask editing and using the handles for sizing. It should be easy to see, with a few caveats (e.g. the state of "Edit Mask" mode should be visible in the HUD rather than just from the image; the outer border of the image you're masking should be more effectively used) Keynote is substantially better at this, in part because it doesn't use an inspector.
That said, if you do have a huge number of options and the standard tabbed inspector layout doesn't work for you, check out the Omni Group's OmniInspector framework. Try to use it for good, and hopefully you'll figure out how to obsess over UI as much as you do over graphics now :-)
(running in slow motion, reaching out in panic) Nnnnnoooooooo!!!!!
:-) Seriously, as I mentioned in reply to Ken's excellent answer, trying to force a "Windowsism" on an OS X UI is definitely a bad idea. In my opinion, the biggest problem with Windows UI is third-party developers inventing new and inconsistent ways of presenting UI, rather than being consistent and following established conventions. To a Mac user, that's the sign of a terrible application. It's that way for a reason.
I encourage you to rethink your UI app's implementation from the ground up with the Mac OS in mind. If you've done your job well, the architecture and model (sans platform-specific implementation) should clearly translate to any platform.
In terms of UI, you've been using a Mac for a year, so you should have a pretty good idea of "the norm". If you have doubts, it's best to post a question specifically detailing what you need to present and your thoughts on how you might do it (or asking how if you have no idea).
Just don't whack your app with the ugly stick by forcing it to behave as if it were running in Windows when it's clearly not. That's the kiss of death for an app to Mac users.
I'm looking for some kind of a resource (website) that would list all possible window/dialog frame styles and their respective combinations with images. I'm only really interested in Vista, as my software won't support older platforms anyway.
I have a more specific case here too: I'm wondering if there are other ways to achieve a smaller-than-normal titlebar for my window than WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW? The tool window style would otherwise suit my needs, but in addition to the normal window border, it seems to add this one-pixel wide white border inside the black outline, and that just looks really ugly for my purposes.
I remember older versions of Adobe Photoshop (CS2?) having these ridiculously tiny titlebars on the tool windows, like 8-10px wide. I'm wondering if those can be done with normal winapi, since IIRC they came in vista flavour too, and conformed to whatever windows skin was in use..?
If it's Vista-only, you can try to use your own window decoration and use the Desktop Window Manager (DWM) API to still provide Aero Glass Theming.
On the other hand, if you're targeting Vista and later, you'll most likely not have to deal with low resolutions. Don't think too much about a few pixels more or less.