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From: Peter B. S. <wyo...@ac...> - 2004-11-02 17:42:46
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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 |