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Raising the bar for web application GUI's

I saw the new “MSDN” style look that foO implemented on one of his sites and it made me think that this might be a good chance for me to share with the rest of you some screen shots of a new web application called “EVS“ my company has developed recently. We decided to go for an Office 2003 look with our menus and toolbars. Since we can count on IE 5.5 or later being the browser used to access our application, we used the 2003 widgets from Ed Boelzner. Our icons were done by Ivan Boyko of VisualPharm. Has anyone else done a sophisticated web UI lately? If you have please send me some links or screenshots - I think it would be fun to compare notes. I've been really into playing with Paint Shop Pro 8, Photoshop CS, and Illustrator CS lately, along with different CSS filters.

thumbnails (click to see full-size version)

 Login
 Homepage
 Menus
 Listing Page

10 Comments

  • Looks nice. Do you have any details on the license of the widgets.

    I am very interrested as I am building a complex system right now.



    I am in the progress of building a new kids community website. As I want complete flexibility on both sides (database and frontend) I want to generate most based on definitions of content managers. These widgets could help me in building up the complex screens



    You can contact me at mh@WebVize.nl when you have any detail for me.



    Regards,



    Michael Hensen

  • Jason,



    The grouping grid you have used on the "home page" and the listbox/grid with the option button on the "listing page", are they both standard controls available in Eds controls library?



    And when you say "we can count on IE 5.5 or later being the browser", have you any idea how your app handles on Mozilla etc? Or to put it another way, if a huge customer came along and said they wanted to buy a $10 million licence of your EVS app but it has to run on [Mozilla|Netscape|etc], have you put any thought into how much effort it would be to give them a working version for that browser?

  • Chris,

    The grouping grid for the home page and the listbox/grid with the option button on the listing page, we did those ourselves. The only widgets of Ed's that we used were for the Menu's and Toolbars.



    To answer your question about the browser compatibilities - We haven't tested our app in any browser other than IE. In the industries and markets we target with our software - we've never run into a non-Windows/non-IE environment. Thinking about it now - it wouldn't take a huge amount of effort to make it compatible with other browsers, we'd just redo the menus and toolbars (which we have in include's already) and possibly re-write a little bit of script for some of the listing pages.

  • The stedy.com site is pretty much (98%) useless in non-IE browsers, so it might be more work than you expect if you're using the same components as they are.

  • Yeah - the stedy.com stuff is done with behaviors (.htc) using VBScript and JScript mostly. I'm not really saying I would convert them to JavaScript - we'd probably re-write them and make them simple menu's like you see with widgets like Telerik's or something. But, like I was saying, it's not really an issue - I doubt we'll lose any sales because of the IE requirement. 99.9% of people we deal with are on Windows using IE already.



    Besides - I'm sick of all the stupidity out there with browsers. I'm not going to spend 3 or 4 times as long as I should have to writing script so that it's compatible with all the different browsers. There should be one standard - and ONE BROWSER, period. So as far as I'm concerned, that browser is IE for now, until someone else takes noticable market share away from it.

  • Shannon - we actually didn't have to purchase any components, they were all openly available for us to implement.



    And it's not that I'm discounting the future - it's just that we understand our clients very well - and not one has ever asked us to make a web application compatible with a browser other than IE.



    I share many of the same thoughts and feelings that you seem to. Personally, I wish there was only one browser, made by a non-profit org that would adhere precisely to the standards. Until something like that happens - we're having to work way harder than we should to build a rich web interface that "looks the same" to everyone.

  • gotta luv RSS... else i'd never have known or found this ;)



    thx for the plug, btw! for what it's worth, i think your webapp UI looks damn nice and i absolutely dig the icons. i swear, a nice set of icons can make the biggest difference in how something looks - not to mention how users respond and react to using it.



    just my $0.02, but "two big thumbs up" on EVS, bud! >:D

  • Does this widgets work well in ie5 ?

  • Aronsson - yes, as far as I know.

  • I'm impressed, I have to admit. Seldom do I encounter a blog that's both equally educative and engaging,
    and let me tell you, you've hit the nail on the head. The problem is something that not enough men and women are speaking intelligently about. I'm very happy that I stumbled across this in my hunt for something relating to this.

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