PM agrees -- 'supporting Aero' does not mean we have to start flying (or get high by any other means)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2006/12/31 02:31 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2006/12/30/1387611.aspx


So the question Gary (the Program Manager on the MSKLC update) asked me was:

Are we planning on updating the UI to be Vista UX guidelines compliant? 

Luckily he provided me with a[n internal] link so I would know what he was talking about! :-)

I think that we support Aero nicely enough:

In fact, I can't imagine much more we could do, really (switching the fonts would kind of block it from ever being installed downlevel at all. since the Vista UI font (Segoe UI) may not be on downlevel platforms), and distance between "supported with a warning about functionality" and "completely disallowed from being installed" is a pretty big one. I am happy to not force any decisions, and keep options open...

And beyond that I'd hate to embed the font and use all the private font stuff I have talked about previously -- across a whole huge UI is just a bigger effort than most people would want to take on.

I guess one could imagine the surface underneath the layout, the piece highlighted in fuchsia below (or a significant piece of it):

getting that transparent look like the Windows Mobility Center has in some of its "dead" UI space:

But even the simplest prototypes of that showed it to be pretty distracting to actually using MSKLC.

And I am as big of a fan of using the latest cool UI tricks as the next person, but not if it is going to affect productivity!

(which is not malign the work people like Kenny Kerr, Daniel Moth, and others. Because I am sure there are UI cases where it can look really cool (and a modified version of Daniel's solution is what made the prototype so easy!).

Luckily for the rest of the guidelines, they aren't too different than the XP ones that we have already gone through (and the big offending problem we had, the tab order, is now fixed). So I guess you could say that we are following the guidelines as well as we are able to....

And one doesn't have to actually become airborne to support Aero (one doesn't even have to be high!).

Anyway, Gary agreed with this assessment, so that stuff is pretty much all set. :-)

 

This post brought to you by (U+2708, a.k.a. AIRPLANE)


Michael Dunn_ on 31 Dec 2006 3:28 AM:

Maybe, at the very least, add a manifest so it uses the v6 common controls?  Gray rectangular buttons are so 2000. :)

Michael S. Kaplan on 31 Dec 2006 4:05 AM:

I actually have a manifest to do that in the project but the buttons seem to come out that way anyway.

Maybe I need to go back and read Heasth Stewart's article a bit closer? :-)

Michael S. Kaplan on 31 Dec 2006 4:17 AM:

Interesting... Application.EnableVisualStyles() does take care of most of the app but not the buttons in the main keyboard dialog itself since they are owner draw (plus I am not sure that modifying those buttons when the rest of the app is modified would look right for the tool?).


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