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An administrative console Part III... [message #12027]

Mon, 08 October 2007 19:32

tvanriper
Messages: 85
Registered: September 2007
Location: Germantown, MD, USA

Member

For the meetings tab, I used a grid control. I didn't have time to make all the colors here similar to the other pictures you've seen, but it's a goal of mine to eventually make that change.

That said, you can see how we colored the active meeting in green. Meetings that have passed, or that show a kind of error (e.g. you've made a change to a user's permission, and the person no longer has the right to work as a stenographer, yet is scheduled to be the stenographer for a meeting) turn red.

http://www.xorbit.com/images/RTXAdminPics/MeetingsTab.jpg

And here's a view of the chat log. This was perhaps the simplest dialog to create, other than the About dialog. My boss found it very nice that we could save this as a PDF file, a RTF file, or plain text file, with very little code. I didn't tell him that I could probably have also saved this as a JPG, PNG, or BMP, too... but I felt such options were probably not the sort of thing most people would have wanted or expected in this dialog.

http://www.xorbit.com/images/RTXAdminPics/ChatLog.jpg

All of the dialogs I've shown in this series, with the exception of the Login screen, are resizable.

I created the graphics for the buttons myself, with a little advice from my boss (namely, he wanted the disabled buttons to show with that reddish color), to include the red glow used for hover. Observant folks may have noticed that I ran this application on a Vista machine; in fact, I developed this on a Vista machine, with no problems.

We have a reason for the color scheme we use: broadcasters typically and necessarily work in dark settings, so a blaringly-white background is a veritable assault on their eyes. They also use a lot of red controls, so we aimed to match that idiom, to help make our application feel a little more like home for them. So, we're not just making things dark because we like it that way... it's actually practical for our target demograph.

I hope anyone thinking about using Ultimate++, upon seeing this, will seriously look into it. You can make some exceedingly nice applications with this tool in a relatively short amount of time. I think this project took me about a month to complete, much of which involved learning how the toolset works (examining code, occasionally modifying code as needed... but so far, only in about two places, both of which have functionality probably folded into the development releases already), and twiddling around with the graphics (because my boss is quite picky about such things).

Incidentally, the e-mail addresses you see in these pictures are all fakes. So don't bother spamming them.

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