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The Interface Designer
Integumentary Customization, Part II
Using "Skins" in REALbasic Applications
Issue: 1.5 (April/May 2003)
Author: Toby Rush
Author Bio: Toby Rush is a music instructor, consultant, freelance programmer, web designer, husband, and dad in Greeley, Colorado.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 9,306
Starting Page Number: 44
RBD Number: 1524
Resource File(s):
1524.sit Updated: Friday, October 17, 2003 at 12:21 PM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
In the last column, we discussed four different levels of implementing "skins" -- customizable interfaces that allow a user to control the look and feel of a program. In this column, we're going to talk about how to set up a skin implementation in a way that makes it easy to design skins, and we'll dive into creating a skin implementation in a REALbasic program.
Given the levels of implementation we talked about last time--and the understanding that a program of this type necessarily involves handing some control of interface design to the skin designer--we can see that different types of implementations have different ways of reconciling the "skinning vs. good interface design" issue. A level I implementation is fairly static, and while the skin designer can impact the aesthetics of the program, the remainder of the interface (spacing, layout, type of controls) are unchanged. The other three levels are far more dangerous from an interface design perspective, since the skin designer is given free rein to replace well-designed controls with those that may be more aesthetically pleasing but less efficient or intuitive for the user.
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Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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