Hi everyone & software announcement...

[pax]

Hi all,

I am a young man trying to find his destiny in programming and I am very pleased to have found a forum like this.

I have been a plain programmer for some time but it was recently when I released my first window application officially. It is a shell extension for one of hex editors.

I code mainly in assembly.
Now I am to develop a robust, insanely fast application to handle drive policies in Windows. Its name will be Drive Policies Management Toolkit (short: dpolmgmt). It will be a GUI to NoDrives, NoViewOnDrive, NoDriveAutoRun, NoDriveTypeAutoRun, WriteProtect (StorageDevicePolicies). I know, you will say, there are many alternatives out there already, but my program will combine all of them in one place. For instance, GTweak already supports it, it has in fact been written by me. It will be 100% free.

One of the reasons I came here is to ask you about arrangement of controls. I don't mean the whole GUI, just the wall of check boxes that will be in it. (To be concise, there will probably be 2 walls of checkboxes, for both local machine and user registry settings.)
I made up 5 variants, I have set up a poll and I would like you to state which one of the 5 suits you best. I will probably make it possible to switch between arrangements, but it will depend on how you'll vote, because in my narrow environment the results weren't clear.

The poll: http://freeonlinesur...4495095&new=True

My act is named pax software development, and its website is http://pax-soft-dev.blogspot.com/
Thank you for reading this to the very end. Thank you again if you voted.

Peace.

[mouser]

Welcome, pax.

I am not known for my good GUI design, so take what I say with a grain of salt -- but the thing I would try to think about with so many checkbox options is what would be the best way to do it that would make it easier to maintain and easier to explain to user what their options are.

That's why I have taken to trying to logically divide options into multiple tabs, and with confusing options sometimes it helps to have room to explain an option.

[skwire]

I made up 5 variants, I have set up a poll and I would like you to state which one of the 5 suits you best.

-pax (June 09, 2014, 03:37 PM)

Welcome, pax.  As far as the poll options go, I don't like any of them.  You have to find a way to break them up via tabs (as mouser suggests) or, if you're intent on keeping them on the same form, at least use groupbox controls to group related items.

[pax]

Wow, quick reaction. Thank you mouser and skwire for your suggestions. Same fact of that I needed to make a poll for it suggests I'd better think over doing it different way.

[Deozaan]

I'd also like to say that though the large spacing helps in some of them, when you have long lists of similar looking items in a column/row format, it helps if every other row is shaded a different color so that the eye can easily see what row the checkboxes belong to.

[mouser]

when you have long lists of similar looking items in a column/row format, it helps if every other row is shaded a different color so that the eye can easily see what row the checkboxes belong to

i have to disagree with this.  the logic is sound for something like spreadsheet rows -- but if you start shading your GUI options different colors just to make them stand out from their neighbors, i think that's going to be confusing.

[rgdot]

In such a case as the OP the text should be above each instead of adjacent to it.

A
square square square

instead of

A square square square