But, the presentation itself gave me some strange feelings. I must tell you that I am probably not in the target group of Embarcadero of their ' original' products. I only have one database to maintain (the one that is used by Sevensteps' software) and that is not a complex one at all. That's also why I only saw half of the presentation: I realized that I probably won't use their products and will look at the Tiburon presentation later today. That's more my cup of tea.
There's another thing that I noticed in the presentation: the user interfaces that I saw were terrible! I saw an enormous amount of cluttered screens, about a trillion buttons in toolbars, 'old fashioned' icons and very complex dialogs. There was one tabbed dialog that had about 20 pages with numerous controls on each page. There were also wizards that help you do some complex work, but the wizards themselves were very complex and did not have a clear and clean design.
I probably understand were that's coming from. From what I saw the software can do a lot of complex tasks for you and you can pick from a large range of database (formats) to choose from. That probably is the reason why the user interface is so complex: there is a lot to do on a lot of database formats.
If I were to redesign the user interface I would start with one option screen where you can pick the database formats that your are interested in. Probably there's only one or two formats that you will be working on (in that session). Based on that choice I guess you can lose half of the buttons, options and windows
Also, in a dialog or wizard, when an page is not available due to previously made decisions: hide the page, don't just make it disabled. It will clean up the windows a lot and will make the software a bit easier to use. There was a wizard with a couple of tabbed pages which only had one active page of the 10 available. That's not a good design. If you only have one page available: lose the tab. There is no point in showing the other, disabled tabs.
That's just my 2 cents worth for now. I only hope that we get better user interfaces in Tiburon...
Bye,
Bart
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6 comments:
Yeah, some time ago I've just downloaded some Embarcadero software to see what company acquired CodeGear. The interface was ugly, I mean UGLY! I didn't expect that anyone is still using BitBtn standart icons?!
I have seen a lot of comments on DatabaseGear products but I did not try them out myself. But, isn't that one of the reasons why Embarcadero bought CodeGear? Now they have the most powerful IDEs so the guys can start to redesign the UI somehow.
The Live Meeting browser version didn't work for me yesterday, it just hung, so I missed the presentation. Thanks for putting this up, I now know I didn't miss much!
I missed the webcast, but I took a peek at the screen shots posted on the Embarcadero site and I saw you meant about the cluttered screens. If anything could use the "ribbon bar" look and feel, it would be these guys.
Lex,
I don't think Embarcadero purchased CodeGear in order to redesign their existing DB apps.
After all, it is cheaper to buy a few licenses of Rad Studio 2007 instead of the entire company.
If Embarcadero allows Codegear to thrive, (IMHO unlike Borland) then we'll see Delphi and other CodeGear products improve many times faster than in the past 10 years under Borland's "ALM-obsessed" management.
I'm sure that Codegear will bring a better "interface-time" for Embarcadero.
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