There are a few annoying traits Prof-UIS has that I don’t see in BCG or CodeJock, and I’d love to see Prof-UIS catch up in this regard. These observations come from just looking at the Office 2007 demos from each vendor (I used the Office 2007 R3 Obsidian style for each).
(1) When the window loses focus, the title bar doesn’t get redrawn, and so stays in the active colour. Dragging another window over it and away again redraws the part that was covered to show the grey inactive colour, while the rest remains in the active colour. See top left of image below:
(2) Often if the window doesn’t have focus and I clicked and drag the title bar up or down, it won’t move. It flashes briefly as the window gets focus (momentarily redrawing in the inactive colour, as it should have when it first lost focus, then redrawing in the active colour), but the window stays where it is. If you click and hold for a moment before dragging then it will drag with the mouse, but it won’t catch on if you drag straight away at even quite a slow speed.
(3) More gradual rearranging of controls on the ribbon bar when resizing would be nice. Eg the Arrange group under the Page Layout tab. It has 7 buttons on it. When there’s enough room the are all large, and when it shrinks the last 6 become 2 columns of 3 smaller buttons. Why is there not an intermediate stage with 4 large buttons and 3 small? Both BCG and CodeJock demos do this. Our project has lots of buttons in some groups, and it becomes quite significant. I think it may be possible to work around this by inserting an extra level in the ribbon tree to group buttons together (but haven’t tried yet), however my point is that there’s no reason this shouldn’t be automatic as it is from the other vendors.
(4) Biggest problem is a known issue, just that the ribbon bar under Office 2007 styles is very slow. Slow to rearrange and resize, and very slow to keep up with which buttons should be highlighted as the mouse moves over them. Try these things in BCG or CodeJock and it’s more or less instant. Quickly move the mouse left and right over a Prof-UIS ribbon bar and you’re lucky to get a change in highlighting more than once a second.
(5) I’ve also seen weird stuff when resizing.
(5A) Often it will continue resizing past where the mouse was when you released the button (if you are still moving the mouse, which often I am as I know where I want the mouse next). It’s as if somewhere it is polling the mouse rather than just using events, and thus actions can get out of order.
(5B) Other times the border lags behind the mouse position while dragging, for example if I drag quickly than hold still (button still down), the border may resize towards the mouse but not all the way, and stay that way until I move the mouse slightly again at which point it snaps across. The latter isn’t apparent in the sample, but is in our project, especially in debug build, and may be more likely to appear when there are lots of docked toolbars too. But debug or not, I can’t see how a purely event-based app could produce this result.
(5C) A less common but more troublesome occurrence is that sometimes even after you release the mouse button, it will continue to be somewhat attached to it. After this, moving the mouse outside the window is fine, but when moving it back across the border that was previously being resized, it re-attaches and drags that border further. You have to click elsewhere to get things back to normal. Again, I can’t see this one happen in the sample, but it occurs in our project.
(6) Buttons with colour indicators under their icons are not available as with the other packages.
On the plus side, Prof-UIS does seem quite powerful compared to the others. For example, MDI tabs can be docked vertically unlike BCG. I guess they each have their own pros and cons, but I see the above list as the main things dragging Prof-UIS back at this time. I hope some of these things are already planned for 2.8.4?
Thanks,
Rob.