Design Concept for VisualBlogger 2004 Beta 3
I keep getting all this flak that my UI design skills suck. My only response
thus far has been... "DUH!" So I've been working on some new UI, the first of
which I showed
off last week. I call it the "sexification" of VisualBlogger (sexification
being a word I just made up meaning "to make sexy.") My CEO keeps telling me that I
should stop using the word "sexy" in relation to software. I told him that if a
computer program was 1/10th as sexy as a woman, more people would be happier
using their computers.
So, colorful metaphors and software-related innuendo aside, here's a
screenshot of where I'm at so far.
The tabs along the top represent different blog posts, even though they
currently say "DockControl1", etc. It should have much more of a Word-like feel
too it. I'm now using Tim Dawson's (man is he
awesome or what?) SandDock control, which
allows me to combine a OneNote feel for documents with a decidedly VS.NET feel
on the right. The Post Options and ScratchPad can now be unpinned and hidden on
the right, giving you lots of blogging space. And, the ScratchPad can fly out
from where it is docked, serving two purposes. 1) It eliminates a bug in which
switching from the HTML view to the ScratchPad to the Design view looses the
changes from the HTML view, and 2) It makes the ScratchPad much more usable for
blog note taking. On yeah, and it can be docked anywhere on the form.
I'm still playing around with it, but it's already growing on me. A
lot. I still need to figure out how you would choose blogs and categories
from this UI, and how to handle the MDI situation with the spaghetti code that
the old form was using. I should get a handle on all that over the next few
days.
Alright, it's feedback time. Is this better than the old UI? Should I try a
few other things instead? Please give me your feedback, cause I want to wrap up
Beta 3 this week.