Chapter20.Perfecting Your Application

Chapter 20. Perfecting Your Application

There's a world of difference between an application that does its job adequately and an application that's intuitive and enjoyable to use. For internal use, a basic, no-frills application may be adequate, but if you're planning on distributing your brainchild to a wide audience, you'll want it to be as compelling and easy to use as applications from the biggest software publishers. You'll need to conform to some fundamental expectations and standards, such as the provision of configuration dialogs and online help. In this final chapter, we'll cover the following topics to help you polish your application:

• Single instance or multiple instances? How you can prevent "clones" of your application from proliferating.

• Modifying event handling. How to change the order in which events are processed.

• Reducing flicker. How to improve the visual quality of your application by cutting down on annoying flicker.

• Implementing online help. Suggestions for providing a variety of help for your users.

• Parsing the command line. Give your users more control over your application with command-line options and switches.

• Storing application resources. Ways to package files needed by your application.

• Invoking other applications. From simple program execution to capturing another process's input and output.

• Managing application settings. The use of wxConfig to save and load settings, and tips for presenting settings.

• Application installation. Suggestions for how users can easily install your application on the three major platforms.

• Following UI design guidelines. Some observations about conforming to the design recommendations on each platform.