Re: How to work with XML in MFC?
"Mihai N." <nmihai_year_2000@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9B8CD62781458MihaiN@207.46.248.16...
If you go to My Computer in XP, you will see the
different groups such as "Hard Disk Drives", "Network Drives", etc. in
boldface. I am simply extending this concept into my own dialogs where I
put some static controls as boldface.
The main difference: MS spends millions of dollars on user research.
Even small details get tried with all kind of variations on non-geek
users.
Add to it the many hours spent on testing for all languages, all kind
of resolutions, checking accesibility, security, etc.
This is another reason why I trust system controls and mistrust the rest.
In most cases the skins I see look like are designed in Photoshop on
Mac by a guy who knows zip zero about how software is actually used
by real users.
In the other class are small applications where the improvements
are only validated with the wife opinion (if that :-)
In general fully skinned applications are the worse offencers.
These are done by medium size companies that have enough money to
sink in such things.
The 1 guy company writing smaller applications discovers fast enough
that a full skinning takes a lot of work with little benefit, so
he will quickly stop. And live with small improvements, like a bold
label, another label color/font, bitmap background. These are
not quite owner draw/custom controls, and most of the basic
functionality is not damaged.
But then, these guys keep looking with envy at the skinned stuff.
So they ask for such "features" in MFC :-)
I agree slight variations on system controls is the most bang for the buck,
but even that is railed on for going against the user's Control Panel
settings. In this day of RIA and web apps. I think Windows apps had better
start looking better than 1 font on a dialog. I agree skins may not be the
way to go, but this mindset of respecting user Control Panel settings for
items that were defined 20+ years ago (when a window was only supposed to
have 1 font) is not compelling even now and will become even more dated as
time goes on. So it rankles me when people start demoting what I see as
progress in using font variety to a good advantage.
I also think your perspective works well for a large company producing large
apps that are widely deployed in many languages, but is not entirely
relevant to others whose customers are more niche and less
internationalized. In my projects, localization is a concern but it is not
important enough to dictate limiting the UI just to make it easier to
localize.
-- David