[MonoDevelop] Addin to post to pastebin from within MonoDevelop

[Chris Howie]

On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 3:20 PM, Anirudh<anirudh at anirudhsanjeev.org> wrote:
> Required markers have been removed. Someone really needs to give me a
> crash course in UI design.

Here's the rules I try to follow:

1. Less visual noise is better.  If you can explain something better
by rearranging the widgets, then do that instead of adding a bunch of
text explaining what to do.

2. A top-to-bottom flow is easily followed by the eye.

3. Provide immediate visual feedback about data validity, if it is not
very expensive to do so.  For example, if something entered in an
Entry is invalid for that entry, disable the button that would accept
that entry (like the OK button, or maybe an Add button).  Don't wait
until they click to show them something is wrong.  If it would take a
lot of time to validate (like doing a big DB query) then this approach
doesn't work very well, but try to do as much validation in advance as
you possibly can.

Note that this also doesn't work very well if your validation rules
are esoteric.  Either keep validation rules simple so they can be
inferred, or you'll have to come up with a way to show /why/ an
invalid entry is invalid.

4. Doing stuff the same way everyone else does is good in that it
makes cross-application UI consistent, but it's bad if it keeps you
from coming up with an even better UI for the task at hand.  That's
something you'll have to balance for yourself.

-- 
Chris Howie
http://www.chrishowie.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Crazycomputers