On Tue, 19 Feb 2013 02:37:47 -0800, Jacob Carlborg <d...@me.com> wrote:
On 2013-02-19 10:29, rumbu wrote:
That's the power of a declarative UI: separate behaviour and design. If
you want a larger button, touch sensitive - even thought sensitive :),
just change the design to better suit device features, but don't change
the behaviour. Just to keep your scroll bar example: in desktop world we
can keep the scroll bar visible on the screen. In the touch sensitive
world, we can hide most of scrollbar content, keep only some arrows to
tell the user there is more data, but leave it to respond to common
gestures to scroll up and down. From the programmer perspective, The
scrollbar object will have the same methods, same events and the same
properties. The end user/designer will call/use these methods/properties
performing different actions specific to target device.
That would be good if it could work like that. But that's not what I
have usually seen with custom widgets. They just don't work in one way
or another.
In the old OS widget model where you have to rebuild the widget from the
ground up if you want to change the look this is absolutely the case, most
programmers suck at reimplementing this stuff. With WPF this is a complete
non-issue. Because the look (style) of the widget is completely, 100%, and
unquestionably separated from the function of the control, I can use a
known-good implementation of the widget without being locked into each
OS's look-and-feel, which means that my app has the same look-and-feel
across many devices. Users LOVE that.
As a UI design I don't give one hoot what the OS thinks my UI should look
like, that's MY job, I succeed or fail on my own, and TBH, OS UI
uniformity is no guarantee of success. I've seen just as many good OS UI's
as bad ones. Because it turns out that the OS UI isn't the determining
factor in a UI's success, the designer is.
The problem isn't just designing a widget the looks differently on
different devices. Sometimes the application needs to be completely
different.
RIGHT! Which is why re-styling controls is so critical. I can get uniform
functionality with infinite stylistic possibilities that allow me to
choose the best style for each device.
--
Adam Wilson
IRC: LightBender
Project Coordinator
The Horizon Project
http://www.thehorizonproject.org/
