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Separating features into Basic and Advanced

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ewemoa:
I think limiting the number of options makes and application more accessible and more attractive especially to new users of your SW.
-phitsc (November 30, 2012, 01:59 AM)
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I am reminded of The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.

anandcoral:
The main accounting app I develop for my company has a big 'settings' dialog. Initially I used to put all in one big window, separated by box/lines. As the options grew, I made them tab pages. Then again tab pages grew to multi-line tabs. Last I made them to tree, similar to mouser's screen shot.

What I have found that the initial loading of the 'settings' window becomes slower and slower, as all options with tab/tree are made. In fact I show a 'Please wait..' while loading the settings window.

Now as a user I get frustrated when I need to enable/disable just one/two options and I have to wait for the full window to load. I was thinking of some logic which allow me to show the window quickly the 1st tab/tree-node and build rest in background, then again user may just want to go to the last tab/node at first ! Haven't found a good way to have both.

In my freeware apps I generally keep the few settings in main window and add new ones in 'advance' button. The 'basic' options I decide on the options I gave in first few releases, as user expect them there in main window, and add few most used, based on experience or so, to it. The advance window may have tabs/tree and may take long to load. This way, I think, I can make both type of users happy.

Regards,

Anand

Renegade:
The main accounting app I develop for my company has a big 'settings' dialog. Initially I used to put all in one big window, separated by box/lines. As the options grew, I made them tab pages. Then again tab pages grew to multi-line tabs. Last I made them to tree, similar to mouser's screen shot.

What I have found that the initial loading of the 'settings' window becomes slower and slower, as all options with tab/tree are made. In fact I show a 'Please wait..' while loading the settings window.

Now as a user I get frustrated when I need to enable/disable just one/two options and I have to wait for the full window to load. I was thinking of some logic which allow me to show the window quickly the 1st tab/tree-node and build rest in background, then again user may just want to go to the last tab/node at first ! Haven't found a good way to have both.

In my freeware apps I generally keep the few settings in main window and add new ones in 'advance' button. The 'basic' options I decide on the options I gave in first few releases, as user expect them there in main window, and add few most used, based on experience or so, to it. The advance window may have tabs/tree and may take long to load. This way, I think, I can make both type of users happy.

Regards,

Anand

-anandcoral (November 30, 2012, 04:05 AM)
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You are looking for this:

http://www.infralution.com/virtualtree.html

The speed will blow your mind. I made a test application with a sick amount of data in it with ZERO wait. Try it out. There's a source version available as well.

anandcoral:
Thanks Renegade for the link. I have forwarded the same to my colleague who is developing our ERP in .Net.

The accounting app I am maintaining is done in Xbase++ with TopDown. It is Clipper (DOS) like language. To save development time, our company went for it as our product is in Clipper originally.

Regards,

Anand

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