Wahoo! So after about 1.5 days of working on it, I have the prefs dialog UI complete (for the most part). It's not hooked into the main project yet -- I started it as a separate project -- but hooking it in won't take too long. I figure that plus making it actually store/load the preferences should only take about another half day to complete. Making the rest of the project actually use the new preferences, however, will take considerably longer.
It's kind of fun trying to figure out what things are going to have preferences (and what they look like) when you don't have a lot of it implemented yet. For example, what's the remote debugger preferences supposed to look like? You can't remote debug in RB 6 yet. Same with the printing preferences. Heh. So I basically just used our previous dialog as a model and figure I can remove or add stuff pretty easily if need be.
I'm actually rather proud of this dialog (which is a change, since I usually am ashamed of RB's UI since it was so horrible on Windows and Linux before RB 6). You can actually navigate the entire dialog using just the keyboard, and there's no nasty UI issues involved with it. Also, the dialog just looks clean. The old one we used to look thrown together. Don't get me wrong, it was certainly functional! It was just impossible to use without a mouse, and tended to just not feel right.
In any event, a prefs dialog is hardly anything to write home about. I'm just happy that I have a large chunk of it done. Now the tough part is getting everyone to approve of it! ;-) Once that's done, I can start hooking it up to the actual project and make it do something! It'll be fun to see what it looks like in its final incarnation -- ie) when the color scheme and icons don't suck. Damn programmer art. :-P
Heh, damn easy proposals. Never quite as easy as you'd like. 17 emails and a half-dozen changes later, I think we've finally settled on a design. It's not too different from my original plan, so I'm cool with it. w00t!
I guess I was wrong. 32 total messages. Yeesh! But still the same design. Heh, next time I hear someone complain that we don't put enough thought into features I'll direct them here so they can see we really do put a lot of time into deciding what goes in and what doesn't.
G'day Aaron, glad to hear you guys *do* actually think about UI design :-)
Repeat after me - Paper is King! Don't design without it.
Go read Joel Spolsky's "User Interface Design for Programmers" at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html or better yet, buy the book so you can hit people with it.
I tend to be rather active in making sure that we have proper UI on as many platforms as I possibly can. Joel has some very good views, and I enjoy checking his blog out. :-)