Telerik blogs

The first CTP of WPF/E is official and it rocks!

If I were Steve Ballmer I would shout: Designers, designers, designers, designers, designers.... Why designers? May be because as a developer (or at least that's how I consider my mindset) I miss too much WPF features in WPF/E at the moment, starting from the handy, nice layouts. I hope someone from the telerik UX team will try it and share his/her experience to the reading public.

Btw, there're new Expression tools (announced as Expression Studio) so expect some blog posts from the people who make our site and products look so nice.

Today's blog post will be dedicated to Vista, and what it takes for an application to look native in Vista. My recipe for Vista style application could be generalized in three main ingredients: sugar, spice and everything nice.

The sugar is the main ingredient and it stands for very rich UI. The major purpose of the rich UI should be usability. The ribbon control is an example of how a control with a complex structure comes to the rescue when an application UI becomes unusable, because of all the controls that should be provided. Sweet!

The spice comes for Appearance. I don't need to be Gartner to say that a visually appealing presentation layer and consistent look-and-feel across different platforms have quite an impact on the user's perception of a given application. I want it Sweet and Spicy!

"Everything nice" covers the many new additions like slick gradients, shapes, animations, scaling, rotation, opacity, etc. Listed like that all these "effects" seem to have come out of a computer game, rather than from a software vendor. But used properly and carefully, they can make working with one's application a very pleasant experience. Just take a look at Vista and you will see what I mean. I think it is a very good example of how all these bells and whistles improve user experience. Very Nice.

Consider this post more like an introduction to my next post in which I'll try to explain what we're doing here at telerik in order to provide you a good amount of these ingredients, and help you "cook" some really tasty and modern applications.


About the Author

Hristo Kosev

 

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