Visio Capibilities for User Interface Programmers?

[AK]

I am modeling/designing a windows program User Interface and am looking for
a Menuing Design Program that will allow me to sketch my various Menu
Screens which will be presented to the user based on what command button was
pressed on the previous screen.

Right now I am using Excel to model the various "screen shots" and adding
macro commands to various command buttons I have placed on the various
screens. For example, clicking Command button # 1 on sheet 1 would take me
to say sheet 13 which would show another menu, Pressing Command button 37 on
sheet 13 would take me to Sheet 22, etc. In this way I can do test runs of
the UI logic before I code the actual program.

I know that Visio has the ability to drop various shapes into a drawing
area. Can a visio project have multiple sheets? Can I easily link other
visio sheets to the shapes so that clicking shape #1 would take me to sheet
13, etc.

Maybe there is some other program out there that helps User Interface
development. Thinks sure are a pain right now.

Thanks for any help.

AK

 

[Al Edlund]

yes, visio supports multiple pages. you might consider the xp design
template and use hyperlinks to move between your page layouts.
al

 

[AK]

Al,

Thanks for responding. I saw that Visio Professional has the XP UI
capability and was not sure what that meant. Can you tll me a bit more about
that. Is is a set of control objects shapes that I can just drag and drop
like I do the other shapes - and thus not have to make my own little shapes
for all the various menu structures and buttons that most windows interfaces
have. Man that would be great as it would save me a bunch of time.

Thanks

 

[Al Edlund]

that's exactly what it is there for.
al

Al,

Thanks for responding. I saw that Visio Professional has the XP UI
capability and was not sure what that meant. Can you tll me a bit more
about that. Is is a set of control objects shapes that I can just drag and
drop like I do the other shapes - and thus not have to make my own little
shapes for all the various menu structures and buttons that most windows
interfaces have. Man that would be great as it would save me a bunch of
time.

Thanks

 

[AK]

Thanks - I'm getting out my credit card right now!

AK

 

[Carol_D]

Have you tried VB.Net it is mainly used for programming but you can use it
for building an interface

 

[AK]

Nope - I will look into that. We are just using VB6 right now.

I did get the visio Pro with the XP interface tools and it is helpful, but
I'll be darned if I can figure out how to unlock some of the shapes to
resize them. I know that windows xp interface probably has some "standard"
for item sizes but I am designing a touch screen interface and need
everything to be bigger so fat fingers can push the bottons and icons as
opposed to a mouse pointer and click.

For example of my difficulty, I tried resizing the "Button Separator" shape
and the "Top-level Menu Item" shape off the "Toolbars and Menus" Shape
Dropdown and can't figure out how to size them. I figured out how to
unprotect the "Top-level Menu Item" shape and drag the endpoint to make it
longer to stretch across the page, but it does not let me make it wider to
stretch it down the page. Inverse applies for the "Button Separator" shape.
I can understand how these things are locked up for ease of designing a
normal keyboard users interface but since the icons and text I will be
having on my interface are about twice the x and y dimension of normal
windows icons adn text I need to be able to stretch everything.

Right now I am having to use Excels drawing tools, along with Corel Draw to
get my layouts scaled correctly. Sure wish I could figure out how to make
Visio more "flexible"!

If you have any tips I would sure appreciate them!


Art