As for the app being "ugly", well we'll take that clearly on the chin! It's certainly a bit grey and could be made to look a lot prettier. The app has evolved from its initial concept 6 years ago (v1 was released in 2005) so, it's true, the UI could do with a revamp.
But, at the same time, it's compact and functional. When you're designing a UI, especially for the desktop, you need as much design screen real-estate as you can get and that's what the small toolbar and tabbed interface gives you. The clumsy tabbed Project panel was a classic example of bad Windows software design (putting everything into tree outlines at the left of the screen because that's the way File Manager did so in Win 3.1). I've never yet come across a better UI paradigm for presenting hierarchical file information than a file tree. They even appear on the Mac, I beleive. The Windows/Mac debate is interesting. I don't want you to think that we don't have a Mac version because we don't think Mac users are worth targeting. Far from it. We'd like to support Mac software design (and Linux/UINX for that matter) and producing a set of Mac widgets is on the list, it's just not at the top of the list right now. A cross-platform version of the tool is another matter entirely though. The options for cross-platform development tools are fairly limited and were even more so 6 years ago. Simply porting an application from one platform to another is not at all easy. There are some emerging technologies that we're looking at but no clear winner yet. If we're going to redevelop GUI Design Studio using cross-platform tools, we need to be sure we're backing the right horse before we undertake this. Macs may make up 10% of the browsing population, but they probably are nearing 50% of the design world (where for a long time, they held over that number). Our Web stats show less that 5% of visitors using Macs but, whether it's 5% or 10%, I'm interested to know how many designers are using Macs to design user interfaces for Windows desktop applications, which do still make up the vast majority of desktop business applications (obviously, Macs are used a lot for platform-independent graphics and Web designs). Jonathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Posted from the new ixda.org http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=42372 ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
