GUI Design Advice

Bridan

I'm looking to design a simple GUI application to display info from a database. I want the GUI to look professional but flashy, with colour and images for buttons. A html type page would be perfect but it needs to be full screen and preferably a stand alone application.

I've used VB6 and Java for GUI design before, but VB in particular isn't very pretty. Any suggestions on a good development tool or should I stick with the above?
Thanks

Evil Phil

I don't know much about GUI development outside of web apps but there's seem to be a number of implementations of XML User Interface Language (XUL) in google. I'm sure there's plenty of people here who can tell you more.

Giblet

Ruby on Rails is pretty quick for this kind of stuff.


http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/rails_take2_with_sound.mov

seamus

HTML & Stand Alone don't really fit in together.

By that I mean that a Web GUI (one written in HTML) will need a browser to display it. You can write your own browser that's integrated into your standalone application - this is a lot of work.
Preferably, you can use another browser such as IE, within your own application. Many application do this for things like Help files. But this negates the stand-aloneness of the application - you still need IE installed and working to use your app.

There's no reason any VC++ or VB couldn't be used. I haven't developed GUIs in them, but from my Delphi days, most Visual IDEs and languages seem to allow you manipulate and display objects whatever way you want.

GUIGuy

Well it all depends how much work you want to put in! You can do ANYTHING in VB6... yes you can do an all singing all dancing 3d engine in it. You can access the windows API so you can do anything that windows provides graphically. You can include a GDI+ type libray so you can do anything C# or VB.NET does in it too.
But I suspect you want some quick and easy libraries that you can just drag & drop. There are tonnes out there.... they vary in cost from $100->1000 so you can choose wahtever you like.

Alternatively its easy to integrate flash and VB, so you could do that.

damnyanks

You could use the new windows presentation foundation. It's meant to look flashy. I'm not talking about silverlight or whatever its now called (It's sorta like flash).

You could also use VB 6 or .net and just customise the layout. You can easily override standard form elements. Something like the attachment can be done quickly and easily. Seems easy on the eye to me (Thats with C# - .Net framework. But exact same can be done with vb.net)

Bridan

Thanks for the replies, I've decided I'm going to stick with VB6 and try the GDI+ type library.

bonkey

Bridan wrote:

I've used VB6 and Java for GUI design before, but VB in particular isn't very pretty.

What's not pretty about it?

Or by "pretty" do you mean "completely ignores Windows Design Standards" ???

GUIGuy

A word of warning

Be aware that you need to dispose of your resources when using GDI+. That's not obvious from VB6. There are no book regarding this as its not a Microsoft recommended strategy. But there are quite a few samples on the Net. Be aware that if you don't clean up you will have a GDI handle leak. That will not show up in taskmanger as a memory leak, but you might see number of handles going up (if you have that column in taskmanager). If you go above the limit in the registry then Windows itself will have difficulty drawing any visual elements and the user will have to restart machine.

There are some VB6 wrapper classes out there, of varying quality. GDI+ is great but you might be leaving yourself open to difficult to track bugs if you mess up... and you might not even see the bugs in your tests.

By all means go for it if you know what youre doing... but if you have doubts then I'd shy away from putting it in a mission critical app.
Safest way is to use normal VB6 and just make your own user controls with graphics that you've drawn in Photoshop.

Bridan

Thanks for the advice GUIGuy