[Mingw-users] UI design

[Peter B. S. <wyo...@ac...>]

Can anyone recommend a good book/website on design considerations for a
UI?  Or I'd be glad to hear any personal preferences, however
controversial and inflammatory they are...

A friend (no, really) has a problem with his Outlook Express locking up
when it tries to scan incoming mail from a POP3 server, and he's always
asking me to telnet in and remove the unwanted emails that are causing
the blockage.  I figured it would be better for both of us - not to
mention a great learning experience - to write a quick app that would
automate the process: log on to the POP3 server, use the TOP command to
retrieve a list of message titles/senders/subjects/sizes, and present a
picklist so he can tag which emails to delete.  All I had to do first
was learn winsock programming from the ground up... how hard could that
be?

Two weeks of sleepless nights later, the winsock side is done thanks to
gcc/mingw and a lot of web searches for API documentation.  Now I'm
stuck trying to figure out a UI to present the picklist.  I was hoping I
could do the whole thing as a console app, but there aren't any built in
CRT functions like I have in Pascal - move the cursor with gotoxy,
change the colors with textcolor, etc.  So I can either port the whole
CRT unit over from Pascal into C, learn everything there is to know
about dialogue boxes and controls in another couple of weeks of
sleepless nights, or hope y'all have a better idea.

I don't care about portability to non-Winduhs systems - this was
intended to be a quick-and-dirty fix... but I'm writing it on an NT 4
box and he's on XP, so whatever I come up with needs to work on both
flavors of Winduhs.  I'm also trying to use native DLL calls as much as
possible so he doesn't have to install some third-party library just to
run my little toy.  But if the best solution involves sending him a
couple of DLLs from a GUI toolkit, I won't holler too much.

Thanks in advance for any clues to get me started in the right
direction.

And yes, I'm trying to wean him off Outlook... not that he'll listen. 
The ideal solution would be to wean him off MS-Borg entirely and set him
up with a nice Linux workstation, but I doubt I'll live long enough to
see that day come.

-------
Peter B. Steiger
Cheyenne, WY