doron's blaahg

"My final DevEdge article...."

Your 'FINAL' or 'most recent'?
I would hate to hear that we won't be getting anymore articles from you!! ;)

CHeers, and thanks for you awesome work!

I no longer work on the evangelism group, so no more DevEdge articles. I'll probably be putting them on mozilla.org now if I write any.

Don't know if you can answer this, but...
Were you laid off? Moved to a different department or a decision made from yourself?

Thanks. Curious minds would like to know ;)

But limit your animations to whatever is required to communicate the necessary information. Avoid annoying animations that discourage ease of use. Ask yourself, "What do I need to show the user, and what is the cleanest way possible to achieve that?" A good example is the Mail application for Mac OS X. Whenever a new message arrives, the Dock icon changes appearance to indicate a changed state.

To put my money where my mouth is, in each new article I'll build a hypothetical application that illustrates the guidelines I'm covering. Today's application is called "Paint" and will be based on the photo-illustrative icon I created in my last article. Together we will complete each step, and by the end of the project we should have a well-designed, 95%-100% Aqua-compliant application. I'll leave some room for personal preferences and the fact that Apple changes the OS every few months.

Due to the positioning of the Dock, remember that when you build an application, you have to be sure that new document window sizes and positions do not violate the Dock's space. Dock is temperamental and Dock loves his space. If you default to a window size that expands behind the dock, users will have a difficult time reaching the navigation and resize areas at the bottom of the screen. I can personally say that more than once I have been rather peeved that I couldn't get to an area of the window to resize because the default window settings always pop up behind the Dock. In addition, the new Dock in 10.1 will allow users to position their Dock location on either side of the screen as well.

Adhere to Window Models. Document windows, Utility windows, Click-through, Layering, Drawers, Controls. How do users open windows, how do you properly title windows?

You Must Promise. To call your mother, to help old ladies cross the road, and to turn your cell phone off at the movies.

For my Paint application, I created a series of icons to simulate a rendering algorithm. While the application is performing this CPU-intensive task, you can always see the status of the document by the icon changing in the Dock.

By building an application that takes advantage of Aqua's many facets, you help ensure that your application will not only look good, but have a chance of becoming a raging success. After a new user clicks on the icon of your program, the first thing he or she sees is the application interface. I know that when I review a product, I am very critical of its visual design. I usually have a short time to learn the new software, so design and ease of use are very important. Aside from those who marvel at the beauty of the command line, most users tend to react the same way.

Dock Animation. Sometimes animating icons in the dock can be useful in communicating the status of the system or application.

Help! Did you include help tags in your applications? (I'd be lost without them.) Also, be sure to take extra time to develop your other help files. The Apple Help Viewer supports HTML, QuickTime, and also AppleScript. Take advantage of it! There isn't anything I hate more than going to the Help menu and finding there isn't any help.

The simple fact is that, when all other factors are equal, where will consumers spend their money? I believe that in the long run, the best looking, easiest-to-use applications will also be the most successful. I think that's why Apple encourages developers to write programs that are 100 percent Aqua-compliant.