Filed under: Design

Interface Inheritance

This friend of mine, pings me and asks my something about UML diagrams. Well, i answer his doubts and then i ask him what he was designing. That is when he tells me something i never thought of. What he told me, gave me a new insight to OOP and the fact that more the options you give to our friendly users for whom we are trying to build such brilliant technology, the more they will get confused by trying out and seriously using a gamut of all possible permutations of those options. In this case, the user is us, i.e Developers, Coders the whole class. Speaking of which, my friend told me about the most unique design pattern ever. He told me about a hierarchy of interfaces. "WHOOHA!!! Hold on!", i told my self,

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Silverlight Grid for Dummies

Being a UI designer is not enough. You should be able to render those designs somewhere. Well, i have started my journey as a UI developer and designer in the world of Silverlight. It is a fantastic framework of tools and technology. The best part being that it uses common languages like XML and C#. Well anyhow, i have been working with it for a little over two months now and i have finally recognized its most important control, the <Grid />.So i am going to give a bit of a Silverlight <Grid/> for Dummies.

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A UI FAQ

At the very outset of this post i would like to state something explicitly: I am a newbie in the world of User Interfaces and User Experience. However, i have been playing around with colours and graphics for the past 6 years now. And i have designed graphics and pondered over user experience when it has come to print media. So, if you think that i even qualify to write something like this, go ahead give it a shot, i will try not to disappoint you. The reason i have decided to put this down in simple word is because many of my friends have asked me these questions before. While i will not give you the ultimate answers, i will try and give you a direction, based on my own experiences and opinion. So here it goes - Q. What are the Rules or Axioms to be followed while designing a good User Interface?

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Elements of Interface Design 2

The prequel of this post was termed Elements of Design. It was really a feeble attempt at trying to explore the various factors of Usability in any User Interface.  I am going to continue in those lines. I am going to talk about the relation between the back-end or the service layer of any system and the system's final User Interface. In particular i am going to explore the the interdependencies between the two.

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Elements of Design

Well, now i know what it means to be busy at work. It has been a tormenting two week period to say the least. And, thankfully, (touch wood!!) I have been enjoying it. It has been a period of great exposure and learning to put it in a sentence. I have been picking up on Silverlight well, so far and look to doing so in the future. But, as usual, the real challenge has not been the technology, but the ideas, the innovations and the concepts that i have had to develop. Working as a part of an Interface Design team in a software firm is challenging. While a lot of credit goes to the platform team or dev team working on the engine, I have come to realize that it is the User Interface that people get to see and use at the end of the day. It is the logical conclusion to any platform or logic engine in the world, Period! As a part of the UI team we have to take care of a few things or aspects of design and development of a product:
  1. Usability
  2. Looks
  3. Speed/Performance

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