I've just bought TMS components and my struggles just lead me to wonder how much time is spent on UI and how much on the nuts and bolts of an app.

My current guess is that UI development outweighs processing development by at least a small margin (very high at the start but hopefully diminishing later).

Just an interesting topic for conversation on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon.

Roy Lambert

Roy,

<< I've just bought TMS components and my struggles just lead me to wonder
how much time is spent on UI and how much on the nuts and bolts of an app.

My current guess is that UI development outweighs processing development by
at least a small margin (very high at the start but hopefully diminishing
later). >>

In the case of EDB - the EDB Manager UI took several months and several
iterations to get to what it is today.  It was a giant PIA compared to the
actual code of EDB.

--
Tim Young
Elevate Software
www.elevatesoft.com

Roy Lambert wrote:
> I've just bought TMS components and my struggles just lead me to wonder how much time is spent on UI and how much on the nuts and bolts of an app.
>
> My current guess is that UI development outweighs processing development by at least a small margin (very high at the start but hopefully diminishing later).
>
> Just an interesting topic for conversation on a wet and windy Sunday afternoon.

For me, coding seems to be much easier than UI development.  It takes me
so long to try and work out the best design for the UI.  Coding just
seems like a formality after I've spent days doing the UI.  And even
then I still don't get it right.

Regards,

SteveG

Roy Lambert wrote:
> My current guess is that UI development outweighs processing
> development by at least a small margin (very high at the start but
> hopefully diminishing later).

It's also the most difficult and challenging part. You shouldn't call it
UI anymore, but "Interaction Design." It's a science and an artform all
by itself. It's the stage in which you switch off your brain as a
programmer and transfer yourself into the mindset of the user. Almost
impossible. That's why the trend is towards the separation of the two:
business coding and interaction design.

> Just an interesting topic for conversation on a wet and windy Sunday
> afternoon.

It sure is. Endless discussion opportunities.

Now that I use DevExpress editors, grids and ExpressBars, the user interface
is much easier to make it look good, but the design layout design is still
something I take a whole lot of time doing. I am also trying harder to
separate the UI and the actual code more, even when it seems a bit silly to
do so.

I think that having the proper toolset is the only way to develop software
these days, and of course that includes Elevate. When you don't have to make
decisions about WHAT libraries to use it is so much faster.

-Johnnie

On 2/11/07 11:01 AM, in article
9609D962-8CBB-4CC5-9285-BA288BFF483D@news.elevatesoft.com, "Roy Lambert"
<roy.lambert@skynet.co.uk> wrote:

> I've just bought TMS components

TMS is good stuff.  I find that TMS and DevExpress's are the two toolkits I
find my self constantly upgrading.  I'm also constantly moving from other
toolkits, like Raize and woll2woll, to TMS and DevExpress's.

My opinion is that the visual layout of the program is just as important as
the coding underneath.  No one wants to use a difficult program and an
inefficient or nonsensical layout is just as bad as buggy software with a
efficient layout.  After all, if the users can't easily access certain
features then there isn't a reason to have those features.