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to ICon Ship by VisualByte
When did you first realize that looks
were important? No, I don't mean some high school experience
you had or the first childhood memory of when you got away
with something just because you were a cute little kid.
I am referring to the way an application looks to our end
users. They don't care how cool our algorithms are or how
much time we spent documenting our code. It doesn't matter
to them if we use procedures versus classes or when we use
'For' loops instead of 'For Each' loops. Some of the first
comments out of their mouths are about how our apps look.
Sure we could argue about whether or not it should be that
way or how it got that way, but the bottom line… it
is that way!
I really don't remember when I first
started to appreciate how much users care about form design;
it was quite a while ago. Maybe it was the reactions I got
from my first attempt at a VB app back in '91. I swear that
thing had more controls in it than a nuclear power plant.
However, I do clearly remember the first eVB app I saw.
I had just unpacked my first
Pocket PC and was all excited about doing something with
it. After I poked around the UI, explored and played with
the basic stuff, I then realized the only game to play with
was Solitaire so I went looking for something more. Sure
Solitaire is timeless, but I craved something new. I headed
off to the web site mentioned in the product literature
and found that there were some places where I could download
free games. The free ones were not as interesting as some
of the other stuff on the market, but I found Yatzee and
a few others that I either hadn't played in a long time,
or I hadn't ever played before. It took me a while after
downloading these games to actually figure out what to do
with them or how to get the darn things on to the Pocket
PC in the first place, but I persevered. Then it hit home.
All of the games looked the same.
They all had that same ugly little icon. This was the moment
I knew there was a problem. That ugly little icon, was a
VB project icon, these were VB apps! For a moment, I entertained
the thought that maybe the developers were dumb or lazy,
but why would all three or four of the apps from different
developers all be missing a proper icon? A month or so later
when I got around to working on my first, eVB app it became
clear. They shortchanged us.
Sure, our friends at Microsoft probably
had their reasons but no matter how you looked at it, eVB
apps and by association eVB developers where handicapped.
At first, I tried to just ignore it and accept that there
was little I could do about it. I began coding and just
didn't care how it looked. Latter I read that there was
a cure, some sort of C++ wrapper. I began to have hope but
figured it could wait; I had more code to write. Months
passed before I shipped the first major beta release to
the public, and by that time, I had developed a thick skin
on the issue. The articles explaining the C++ wrapper demanded
more time and attention than a quick five minute fix, so
I put it off. I shipped my beta with that ugly little icon,
but surely the app would set itself apart. It didn't need
no spiffy icon to earn respect.
The feedback started to trickle in.
Appearance was top on the list. "Too fat" they
said, "I don't like the color," said someone else.
"Gesh, how could users be so superficial I thought"
<g> and then there it was… "Could it have
a better icon?" somebody asked. All kidding aside,
it didn't matter what I thought or how I felt about C++,
it was clear that the ugly little icon had to go. User feedback
is just too valuable to ignore and I wasn't going to second-guess
the beta feedback. I found ways to make it smaller, I added
a feature so that users could configure the background color
and I went back to the article that describe how to fix
the icon problem.
I started to follow the article step
by step. It included code samples that I could cut and past
into eVC++. There were a lot of little steps involved, but
I figured if I just did exactly what the article said, I
would be okay. I got about a quarter of the way through
the article to the point where I was suppose to run the
C++ compiler to make the wrapper. It had been a while since
I had done anything in C, but I knew that the compiler error
that I got was not good. I was getting into it now though,
so I fiddled and started to take a more serious look at
the code that I had pasted into the project. The compiler
error was one of those wonderfully obscure errors that you
get when you are missing a bracket. I could deal with that,
so on I went. After overcoming two different syntax errors,
which both originated in the sample code, I finally got
the wrapper to compile. I moved on to the next section which
described a long list of little tweaks required to the INF
file that was created by the Application Install Wizard.
I paused here and thought about how the author of this article
had at least two typos that I had found in the eVC++ sample
code. Please bare in mind, this was probably the shortest
C++ app that I had seen since 'Hello World'. The chance
that this guy didn't have other typos in the following list
seemed slim and I didn't want to waste my time on trouble
shooting something I was just starting to understand. So
off I went to find somebody else's article on the issue.
The next article I found came from the
Microsoft site and it was shorter than the first article.
Both seemed like benefits. The code even compiled without
taxing my limited C skills. The problem with this article
was that it stated that the best way to run this particular
wrapper was to pass it the source path and file name as
a command line argument. Do you think it explained how to
do that? Of course not, it was a very short article.
Off to the forums I went. I left questions
and shared my experience only to find that some developers
had previously experienced my frustration, but had not found
a good solution yet. I even had one guy with the nerve to
respond "If you'd rather not do it yourself, have a
look at (some web site I refuse to mention here)",
the site advertised the service of making a wrapper for
a fee. It was his site. It was as if to say.. "I know
how to do it but I ain't gonna tell cause I want to extort
people for five bucks every time they want to make a wrapper
for one of their projects." I sent him a private email
asking that he advertise elsewhere and that I was a strong
supporter of free enterprise but explained how I thought
the spirit of developer forums was about sharing. He had
a funny way of sharing.
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