More Window Design Issues

In this final short section, I provide you with some basic, miscellaneous tips about window design. For each tip that you follow here, you will have 100 fewer angry customers, and 10 fewer angry customer phone calls. Sounds like a deal to me! (That’s obviously not a guarantee, so please don’t sue me.)

Big Fonts, Little Fonts

Make sure you test your program using the Large Fonts setting on Windows. So many programmers forget this, and then they start getting calls from users explaining that they can’t see all the controls on the dialog box! Very scary.

You can turn on Large Fonts (and even Extra Large Fonts, these days) from within the Display Properties in Windows. On Windows XP, this is in the Appearance tab, shown here:

Adding a Status Bar Control

A status bar is an ideal place to display information about your program without stopping the program with a dialog box. Most of the development tools these days have easy support for adding a status bar to your program.

You can see the status bar in Figure 3.12. This figure shows Internet Explorer, and the status bar is at the very bottom of the window. The status bar shows the URL of the hyperlink the mouse is floating over.

Figure 3.12: The status bar in IE shows you the URL of the link the mouse is hovering over.

Custom Mouse Pointers over Your Window (No!)

You can create your own custom mouse pointers that the user sees only when pointing to items in your program. Cool, huh? No! If I ever get hold of one of your programs and I see a custom pointer, I will never speak to you again, my friend. It’s annoying and useless, and it adds no value to your program. The reason is that when I’m moving happily along and suddenly the mouse pointer changes, it throws everything out of kilter. The changing mouse pointer is akin to a misspelled word in a book: You’re reading along just fine and when you suddenly hit something that’s not quite right, your reading stops dead in its tracks. Similarly, a bizarre mouse pointer causes sudden (albeit slight) confusion, making your program harder to use. Just don’t do it, okay?

(PS: Microsoft decided to add a custom pointer in early versions of Internet Explorer, and this pointer is now officially part of Windows. This is the little hand with a friendly finger pointing up. This is the one time we can allow it. But no more. No more custom pointers, please.)