#12 Better Icons

[Anonymous]

The toolbar icons right now, although informative,
should be worked on more. The background is white, when
it should be transparent, and it would be nice to have
a slightly different image for when the mouse hovers
over the icon. The main application icon could also be
improved.

[oldspammer]

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I have encountered software that has home-made toolbars, and
they can get unwieldy by getting to large, and they can be
inflexible with regard to user-configurability. A lot of
times these toolbars do not have balloon tool-tips, or any
status bar displays of any kind.

I recommend that you have to look into tool palettes that
have programmable / user configurable icons and functions.
Each icon should have tool-tip help. The toolbars should be
dockable.

For example, just look at MS Outlook Express version 5 or 6.
Or MS Word 97, or later versions. The user can right-click
a tool-bar and configure it and other toolbars to appear or
not via a pop-up context menu with each toolbar name having
a checkmark or not beside its name.

For another example, look at the MS Office
toolbar--Microsoft Office Manager (MOM). In this software
each icon is user-configurable. A user can even drag and
drop a new file / .exe link onto the bar and a new icon will
appear. The suite of icons / functions available can be
checked off to add or remove various functionalities, and
the appearance of the icon ordering can be customized by the
user by mouse clicking in a customization dialog property
box an up or a down icon positioning button.

Probably there are numerous MSDN-related articles written
about how to professionally develop the usability of such
toolbars.

I am pretty sure that the later / newer versions of MFC and
Visual Studio have built-in controls to automate the
handling and configuration of such things. It just takes a
little research and you'll find some example code that
demonstrates exactly what I'm talking about. The keywords
for searching are probably specific, so you'll have to do
enough searching to find what Microsoft has named some of
this stuff.

Often in order to take advantage of the latest GUI
functionality and features, you have to have the latest MS
software development software like MS Visual Studio 2005 or
whatever plus the corresponding MSDN Library of online help
information.

The latest operating system often helps too because often a
set of features is unavailable unless the target user-system
is running at or above a certain operating system version.
There are features in WinXP not in Win2k. There are
features in Win2k not in Win9x or WinMe.

One developer of shareware software with whom I have had
contact said that MS Windows Vista is more tricky to get
your software running on because of all of the added
security schemes that Microsoft has added to the system. It
might be worth your while to investigate as soon as you can
what MS Windows Vista has in store for desktop users in the
next few years when all computers might be 64 or more bits
and have multiple cores on-board each CPU chip. Already
there are minimum hardware requirements to run Vista, so if
you're going to download a DVD ISO image of a RC / beta copy
of it, make sure you have a good 3-D graphics display card
for all of the new wiz-bang desktop metaphor graphics
Microsoft has put into this thing.