On Linux it uses GTK+, on Mac OS X Cocoa, and on Windows a custom views library, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsvNebq1dRg and also documents from http://dev.chromium.org: http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/chromeviews http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/views-windowing
I don’t think of them as arrows, but as a visual mnemonic of the current state. So, showing a triangle pointing down shows descending order. It is visually in line with the icon with the largest item (base of the triangle) at the top of the list and the smallest (point of the triangle) at … Read more
The crucial factor is whether the menu option requires additional information (input or a selection) before it carries out the operation. So Help-About doesn’t require an ellipsis, but File-Open does. That’s what the Microsoft, Apple and KDE guidelines say anyway. Microsoft Windows applications are supposed to follow Microsoft’s “User Experience Guidelines”. Here’s what they say … Read more
Good icons are hard to design. I have tried to design my own, and have used in-house graphics designers as well. However, building a good icon set takes a lot of work, even for the graphic designer. I believe your best solution is to buy/find a set of icons for use in your projects. The … Read more
Depending on who you ask, they might even tell you that an interface that needs tool tips to be understandable needs to be redesigned, badly (cf. Jef Raskin: The Humane Interface). In fact, tool tips are a solution to a very specific problem: Iconic buttons with no labels, such as seen on toolbars. Whenever you … Read more
Hidden – This is the best approach for actions that are never available to the current user. There is no point in having the user waste mental effort figuring out why something is disabled if there is no action they can take to change this. Disabled – This is the best approach for actions that … Read more
Not to kid, but HTML. It’s cross-platform, and sums up the gui-layout in a simple textfile. It’s definitely mature, as well as well-understood and well documented. There’s a bunch of ways to template HTML files for dynamic content, and other ways to convert custom syntaxes to HTML if you dislike angle-brackets. Client-side scripting w/ Javascript, … Read more
One technique that’s common (especially in older editors) is called a split buffer. Basically, you “break” the text into everything before the cursor and everything after the cursor. Everything before goes at the beginning of the buffer. Everything after goes at the end of the buffer. When the user types in text, it goes into … Read more
I test my GUI against my grandma.
Admin UI page of Mongodb provides some useful links. Check out