As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 11 years ago.
In my opinion treeviews are overused, therefore I don't really care for them. Sometimes they're necessary but I can imagine that one could always find a good alternative to the standard treeview.
What are some other innovative ways to display hierarchical information that convey the same information without the drab of a treeview? Which one(s) are the best? Should I just be happy with the treeview because that's what everyone knows how to use?
Take a look at Quince for some UI (they call it UX) inspiration. Search for hierarchical.
Examples include patterns such as Cascading Lists and TreeMap.
From those, you can click the "related" button to see even more ideas.
UPDATE: 2014-Sep-21, Sad news from Infragistics: "Quince Pro - We are officially retiring this product." More on their blog under "Product Status Change Notifications". I hope they retain it for a while as reference!
First off - I don't necessarily agree that TreeView's suck. TreeView is a fairly clean, standard, understandable way for people to work with a hierarchy of items.
That being said, there are many other alteratives. You can have multiple lists, with a way to go up/down in the tree. You can have something like Vista's file browsing, where you have an address area with a list under, and can drill down. There are many other options.
TreeViews end up being used in many cases, though, because it's one of the more concise ways of displaying a hierarchy, and it's obvious that you're looking at hierarchical data.
What I find works well is a combination of more advanced controls and tree views combined together. For example, take Outlooks explorer bar setup. I think that works well.
Related
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I've seen a lot of developers who move across VS almost quicker than you can see. A lot of it seems to be short cut keys. I'm a terrible hunt and find it in the menu. Is there a tried and test way of getting your speed up to dome of the VS masters? Is it just memorizing all those short cut keys. Maybe removing the menus so that you can ONLY use the shortcuts? How have others done it? Are there other techniques?
EDIT
I've seen a lot of the key-binding and key code lists. But its actually going about putting in practice so that its second nature.
This isn't my forte but... print out a spreadsheet, if you will, of all the shortcuts you think you might like to use.
Plaster it to your desk. Whenever you would like to reach for a menu, force yourself to go over this spreadsheet.
Slower at first, faster in the end.
(See the link below for a list of spreadsheets from Microsoft, though you may want to reformat the data there.)
Good luck sir.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
What programming language/method would be best suited to writing a desktop app that
filters question types and displays a listing of those questions to view.
For example, if I have a mix algebra, geometry, and calculus questions stored in the app,
I should be able to select just the algebra questions to view and print.
I have a little experience with python/django but I've never made a desktop app before.
You have lots of options. You will need to make several design decisions before you move forward. Things to consider are:
Which technologies do you feel comfortable with?
How much time/effort do you want to put into the project?
Are you willing to spend money on tools?
Etc.
That being said, the rest of this answer is to give you some options to consider:
You'll need a data structure which can filter the problems for you.
From your description, the first thing I thought of was using a
database, however I'm not sure if you are familar with databases, in
which case you'd have to create some classes/structs that would allow for you to do the filtering yourself. Some options for databases are SQL Express, Oracle, MySQL, DB2, and many more.
Another thing to consider is you mentioned several different type of
math problems. You'd want to consider how you would be displaying
the problems. Mathematica formats math problems nicely, but if you
wanted to go down this road, you'd either have to find a tool that
would allow you to display that math problems in a syntax like
Mathematica or do exports/screen shots of the problems and have those as
part of your program.
Another option would be to try to find a
language that has some sort of plugin for TeX or LaTeX (For example,
you can see how wikipedia allows for nice math formatting here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Displaying_a_formula
This sounds like a good pet project to play with to learn different technologies. If that is the intent, great. If not, then you might want to do some googling to see if someone else has already created what you are looking for.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
For the last several years it seems that radio buttons have practically disappeared. Selecting simple values for fields is easier by dropdowns (they are more compact), and even when the items to select are large, checkboxes (with radiobutton-like behavior) seem to be preferred.
Just now I wanted to make a feature for a grid (in a webpage) where you should be able to select a single row. Radiobuttons would be the appropriate element here (since only a single row is selectable, and one row must be selected at all times), but the instinct is to put a checkbox, because it seems more... appropriate and intuitive. It's like "selecting" has become synonymous with "ticking off", and a checkbox with its checkmark seems to be the right symbol for that.
Am I the only one with this sentiment, or are the radio buttons really on their way out? And what should I use?
No, radiobuttons are not dead, they fill a very specific purpose. Checkboxes with radiobutton-like behavior are nothing more than evidence of bad design. If your instinct says to use a checkbox in your scenario, you need to study a bit more about usability to improve your instincts because your instincts are wrong.
Radiobuttons and checkboxes have very distinct meanings. Checkboxes mean "zero or more choices", radiobuttons mean "exactly one choice". If you use them in other ways, many of your users are guaranteed to be confused.
If your design requires and allows only one row to be selected at a time, use radiobuttons. Not probably should use radiobuttons. Not "go with your instinct". Definitely use radiobuttons. There is no gray area.
For one experts opinion on this matter, see Jakob Nielsen's article titled "Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons". It's from 2004 but still as relevant today as the day he wrote it.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I will be teaching only one lecture on basic Prolog to students with little to no experience in programming. I'd like them to see that programming and Prolog can be used in the real world, perhaps even to do cool things.
I have looked at this and this threads, but I cannot find anything that is visually appealing that I can show them when we wrap up the lecture.
Do you have any suggestions for cool applications that use Prolog? I'm especially looking for something that can be shown as a video or slideshow.
If what you want is to highlight the uses of prolog and use audio-visual media merely for presentation purposes, combining the following 2 links might do it:
Natural language processing with prolog in the IBM Watson system
IBM's Watson supercomputer destroys all humans in Jeopardy
Dynalearn is implemented in Prolog and has animations.
See:
http://personnel.univ-reunion.fr/fred/Enseignement/Prolog/index.html
under "La librairie clpfd", there are links to 3 finite domain constraint animations (N-Queens, Sudoku, Knight Tour) that are used in this class.
InFlow is written in Prolog. You may browse through the examples and / or contact the author for details. VisiRule might also help.
Disclaimer: I have not used either InFlow or VisiRule, but I do use WIN-Prolog which is the environment used for both programs.
+1 for Visirule. It is, as far as I can tell (and I've researched this topic quite a lot) a unique visual programming tool (I don't know of any other visual tool that is easily reduced to a turing-complete language). I have implemented a trouble-shooting website with it along with various other solutions. Highly recommended- version 5 coming out soon too.
As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.
Closed 10 years ago.
I have a team lead who seems to think that business logic is very subjective, to the point that if my stored procedure has a WHERE ID = #ID — he would call this “business logic”
What approach should I take to define “business logic” in a very objective way without offending my team lead?
I really think you just need to agree on a clear definition of what you mean when you say "business logic". If you need to be "politically sensitive", you could even craft the definition around your team lead's understanding, then come up with another term ("domain rules"?) that defines what you want to talk about.
Words and terms are relatively subjective -- of course, once you leave that company you will need to 're-learn' industry standards, so it's always better to stick with them if you can, but the main goal is to communicate clearly and get work done.
One way to differentiate is that "business logic" is something the customer would care about and that could be explained to a customer without referring to computer-specific words.
You could try to argue your point with a timed example, run a sql select against an indexed table and then run a loop to find exactly the same item in the same set but this time in code. The code will be much slower.
Let the database do what it was designed to do, select sets and subsets of data :) I think realistically though, all you can do is get your team together to build a set of standards which you will all code to, democracy rules!