For those of you that liked the Garret Dimon slides I posted last week or so, here goes another taste of his groove with these slides where he makes a very good overview at App UI design.
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Application Interface Design
View more documents from Garrett Dimon.
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General opinion of reviewers is that Mac’s envied operating system just got one step closer to heaven. At first glance, the new OS doesn’t show any substantial changes, but if you do go deeper, you will find that the $30 dollars that the upgrade cost are well deserved. Besides mayor performance upgrades, Snow leopard has subtle but very significant changes to their UI that every user would appreciate. This is somehow a message to Microsoft: We users don’t want a flashier OS… we want a FASTER ONE! Are you guys from Redmond taking note? Hello?
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| Apple’s snow Leopard presentation in the WWDC. (World Wide Developers Conference) |
I found another high end testing tool for Web and Windows applications called Ranorex. Their website is full of information and they even have a demo version for you to play with. Company profile seems very solid and their site is top 400.000 which isn’t to die for, but at least gives you a serious guarantee that you are not dealing with a pizza shop.
The full package includes many app for test customization through .NET scripts, and support for 3rd party controls like DevExpress and QT. It’s a bit expensive, at 980 Euro (Premium License) But its extensive list of features might deserve the big bucks.
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| Click on image to access site. |
Speaking of Microsoft, check out this video with the presentation of their automated testing tools and APIs for Winforms, AJAX, and Windows Presentation Foundation. Find out how to use Team System 2010 to ensure UI and application quality.
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| Click on image to access site. |
BTW, Don’t you think the word “Technical Evangelist” is the scariest thing since Linda Blair?
Project White is a User interface testing framework for Win 32, Java and Microsoft’s automation Library. We haven’t used it yet, but I did read the specs and some reviews and it sounds a promising bug free tool. Their homepage has thorough information, and I found that developer Ben Hall played a bit with the software and posted the results on his blog. Being Open Source, and having the documentation and reviews that is has, I want to take a wild guess here and say that this is the most promising UI testing tool we’ve featured at Iconshock Blog. Those of you dear readers that still enjoy the luxury of free time, should check it out immediately, and tell me your results. Meanwhile, your favorite blogger will be chained to a wall in a dark cellar typing all this insightful content just for you, from a 512 RAM machine while the tropical sun of Colombia hits our joyful streets. Can you imagine such torture?
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| Click on image to access Project White site. |
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| Click on image to access Ben Hall’s cool Blog |
P.D. The cellar thing is a joke. The PC joke is not a joke. BTW, I live in the capital of Colombia, Bogota, and although we are technically in the tropic, this is one of the highest cities in the world, so we don’t see the sun very often.
The two or three people in the whole world that actually read my post about the evolution of the GUI should remember when I wrote that Graphical user interfaces were evolving towards their independency from physical space. Holograms are a fascinating concept in this regard, because they represent just that, an image that is not bounded to any 2D physical space, and that is a complete, moving 3D graphical representation.
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| In 2006 Alexander Macqueen shocked the entertainment and fashion world with the use of this life size Hologram of super model Kate Moss |
As impressive as holograms can be, they have always lacked of proper interaction with the world around them. They can carry data, and interact with users, but the whole experience is ghost like, because they give the human eye a pretty realistic stimulus of presence, yet they don’t feed our sense of tact, ruining the illusion of realism for our brain. Well, that is until now.
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Researchers from the Shinoda Lab and the University of Tokyo presented at SIGGRAPH this year a prototype of hologram that emits ultrasound to make the user believe they’re really feeling and “touching” the 3D image. This sense of realism could be implemented on so many applications that as amazing as it is, can be terrifying if you put some thought into it.
Now this is what a mean when I talk about friendly software! I am trying to showcase every UI (user interface) and GUI (Graphical user Interface) test tool I can find, and this is the most user friendly of all reviewed so far. Everything is controlled under a usual windows GUI, and you don’t need to do any programming whatsoever, unless of course you are obliged to fine tailor complex test routines. This app was designed for Web/AJAX testing and ASP.NET applications, and has a tight integration with visual Studio. The software costs around $1200 bucks, has plenty of documentation and even video tutorials at their webpage. This software is so easy to use, you could train a German Shepherd to be your app tester. Wouldn’t that be so cute, that your office would be flooded by crazy animal loving clients?
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| Click on image to access site. |
Dogtail is THE way to go if you have to find an automated way of testing your software’s graphical user interface, but don’t have the big bucks to invest in a high end commercial tool. Almost all commercial tools out there have the advantage of good support and reliability, but some of them somehow are a bit restricted in their capacity to customize the tests we will perform. Dogtail is an open source project, not necessarily a tool by itself, but actually a framework written in Python, where you can build your customized GUI tests. This alone gives you unlimited power to adapt your tests specifically to your needs. Sure, you cannot hire your grandpa as GUI Test supervisor, you need to code your tests. Here’s an step by step guide by Len Dimaggio. Dogtail works very well on Gnome and GTK apps and we at Iconshock highly recommend it.
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| Click on image to access website. |
I am researching lately about automated ways to test Graphical User Interfaces, which I have to say, is a new and now fascinating world for me. I found a couple of days ago a commercial tool we are planning to test at Iconchock called GUIDANCER. (you can read the post here. ) and today I found out another effort, this time open source, called FEST.
I watched the videos and it looks very promising in deed. You can read the product description by the project’s main programmer, Alex Ruiz here. If any of you out there tests it, we will be glad to publish your thoughts.
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| Click on image to read full article |
I know it’s quite a pompous title, and I am surely lucky if this article manages to encompass half the premise. What I want is to give you a mayor overview through the history and concepts of the graphic user interface, something so ubiquitous its easy to ignore.
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Welcome to a new blog week, as always, full of enlightening news, thought provoking articles and life changing quotes. Hmm… am I talking about my blog?
Anyway, I wanted to begin this week with this interview made by PUSHING PIXELS to the nice Alexandra Imrie from the German software development company BREDEX. She gives us an insightful overview on GUIDANCER, a program designed to test Java application and HTML user interfaces. Besides staring for hours at her photo, you should give this tool a test drive. You have to register to their site to request a free demo license. We at Iconshock will certainly check it out too.
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| Click on image to read full article |
I ran into a very interesting article where 10 techniques are given in order to improve Graphic User Interface Design.
Here are the 10 most important techniques you should use when designing an interface:
1. Padded block links
2. Typesetting buttons
3. Using contrast to manage focus
4. Using color to manage attention
5. White space indicates relationships
6. Letter spacing
7. Auto-focus on input
8. Custom input focus
9. Hover controls
10. Verbs in labels
Remember to always use what suits your project the best 
Source: Smashing Magazine
Digilicious is a Chilean Blog about design. This week a very interesting article about User Interfaces written by Alejandro Pantoja, LEPLANCTON, was published there and I wanted to share it. So, here’s the English Version of it
We’re all familiar with the concept of GUI (Graphical User Interface), but few have heard about the TUI concept, or Tangible User Interface. What’s the difference between both? What implications does this change has on interaction experiences?
