I've been playing around with GetOrgChart and have read all the demo html files on how to personalize the chart, as well as all the the documentation on the 8 types of orientations. But, I was unable to accomplish what I am after.
What I believe I need to do is to use 2 types of orientations in the same OrgChart as in my company, we have more than 230 people under 3 directors. If I only expand to the 2nd level, the organisation chart is impossible to read as a result. So to fix it, I want to have all the odd numbered levels in one type of orientation, or something similar to that:
http://www.basicprimitives.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=78&Itemid=122&lang=en
Is what I am saying even possible with GetOrgChart? If so, please explain how it can be done.
Apologies if my English isn't great.
Actually GetORgChart supports mixed Hierarchy
Here is the demo: http://www.getorgchart.com/Demos/Mixed-Hierarchy
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My need is to have about 30 states fro the Tree Items and as per the limitation CTreeCtrl will not support not more than 15 States.
From lots of stackoverflow browsing I found that I need to write a Custom Draw on the Custom CTreeCtrl.
Can anyone suggest me a good link/demo code for implementing the Custom Draw for the additional States.
Thanks in advance :)
Codeproject has a bunch of code about this.
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/325/A-custom-drawn-TreeList-Control
States are not everything: It depends on how may symbols you need...
Merge states and symbols into the needed permutations.
You can create your own CImageList and use drawing icons to create the mixed symbols.
I'm going to make an app which will require messaging. Now I have questions about making the messaging UI. I want to make it similar to Go SMS Theme Minimal UI
I am assuming that I'll have to use listview and 9 patch png.
But I need a expert advice.
I would say that that is a good approach. You will definitely need a list view, the real question is just how to build the list item background.
Looking at the image you shared, the pointy part of the box (outlined in red) is really all that can't be stretched, so you could make a 9 patch similar to this.
The top and left are the important part, they tell the 9 patch which parts can be stretched (or repeated, really. The bottom and right tell it which parts can contain content. So if you always need a certain amount of padding then you can use those to define that.
I'm not a designer, but what I like to do is take an image like this, obviously trim out the content, then trim it down in the middle so one black line on either part (top/bottom, left/right) is only 2 pixels wide. This allows the smallest possible asset so you don't load as large of a bitmap, but still gets all of the appropriate information.
I was wondering how does Nike website make the change you can see when selecting a color or a sole. At first I thought they were only using images and when the user picked a color you just replaced that part, but when I selected a different sole I noticed it didn't changed like an image it looked a bit more as if it was being rendered. Does anybody happens to know how this is made? Or where can I get further info about making this effect :)?
It's hard to know for sure, but my guess would be that they're using a rendering service similar to that provided by Adobe's Scene7.
It's a product that is used to colorize/customize a base product image based on user choices.
If you're interested in using the service, I'd suggest signing up for their weekly webinar. I attended one a while back and was very impressed with their offering. They showed the Converse site (which had functionality almost identical functionality to the Nike site) as a demo.
A lot of these tools are built out in Flash using a variety of techniques:
1) You can use Flash's BitmapData object to directly shift the hues of the pixels in your item. This is probably the simplest technique but often limits you to simple color transformations.
2) You can pre-render transparent PNG's (or photos, I guess) containing the various textures you would want to show on your object (for instance patterns or textures) and have them dynamically added to your stage at runtime. This, I think, offers the highest fidelity but means you need all of your items rendered upfront.
3) You can create 3D collada files and load them via a library like Papervision3D. Then dynamically change the texture at runtime. This is the most memory intensive technique and tends to result in far worse fidelity, but for that you get a full 3D object that you can view in space.
I'm sure there are other techniques but those are the top 3 I can think of. I hope that helps!
My web applications have pages that display many static fields.
I know that poor layout invariably leads to information overload and poor readability.
My Question:
Are there any best-practices or heuristics for laying out a screen that contains many static fields?
Ordinarily, I would reference Bill Scott and Theresa Neil's excellent book, but I can't seem to find any guidance for this issue.
Here are some guidelines that I'm inclined to follow:
Group related fields.
Position the major (or parent) fields towards the top and the left. Position the minor (or child) fields towards the bottom and right.
Don't feel obliged to fill every pixel. Consider white space if it will improve readability.
Favor progressive disclosure wherever possible.
Consider an accordion control.
Perhaps a Details on Demand approach would work well. Ask yourself which data are absolutely and immediately relevant to the user and group those, while hiding the other data. You can always provide an 'Expand' link or control that would allow a user to view the details if desired.
(It's good to see that you're looking at interface design patterns. They are often overlooked!)
I work on HR software and have faced this problem many times. One thing that we keep seeing in feedback when we introduce collapse controls or any progressive disclosure pattern really is that our users don't like the way those types of "web 2.0" (their words lol) pages don't print out. So just a reminder if your user base still insists on printing large pages of data include a print media stylesheet.
Depending on how large your set of data is I'd seriously consider a some search functionality or a sorting mechanism. Many times when the data set is large different users have different priorities and allowing customization is the only way to satisfy a wide audience.
I think you pretty much answered your own question, especially the grouping of important fields tied to progressive disclosure.
Out of curiosity, I would love to know what tag clouds formats best serve the purpose of discovery of more and more (relevant)content?
I am aware of 3 formats, but don't know which one is the best.
1) delicious one - color shading
2) The standard one with font size variations -
3) The one on this site - numbers showing importance/usage.
So which ones do you prefer? and why?
Edit:
Thanks to the answers below, I now have much more understanding of tag cloud visualization techniques.
4) Parallel Tag Clouds - a simple use of parallel coordinates technique. I find it more organized and readable.
5) voroni diagram - more useful for identifying tag relationships and making decisions based on them. Doesn't serves our purpose of discovery of relevant content.
6) Mind maps - They are good and can be employed to step by step filter content.
I found some more interesting techniques here - http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~ccollins/research/index.html
I really do think that depends on the content of the information and the audience. What's relevant to one is not relevant to another. If an audience is more specialized, then they will be more likely to think along the same lines, but it would still need to be analyzed and catered to by the content provider.
There are also multiple paths that a person can take to "discover more". Take the tag "DNS" for example. You could drill down to more specific details like "UDP Port 53" and "MX Record", or you could go sideways with terms like "IP address" "Hostname" and "URL". A Voronoi diagram shows clusters, but wouldn't handle the case where general terms could be related to many concepts. Hostname mapping to "DNS", "HTTP", "SSH" etc.
I've noticed that in certain tag clouds there's usually one or two items that are vastly larger than the others. Those sorts of things could be served by a mind map, where one central concept has others radiating out from it.
For the cases of lots of "main topics" where a mind map is inappropriate, there are parallel coordinates but that would be baffling to many net users.
I think that if we found an extremely well organized way of sorting clusters of tags while preserving links between generalities and specificities, that would be somewhat helpful to AI research.
In terms of which I personally prefer, I think the numeric approach is nice because infrequently referenced tags are still presented at a readable font size. I also think SO does it this way because they have vastly more tags to cover than the average size based cloud a la the standard.
I would go with #2 out of the options you listed above.
1 - The human eye recognizes and comprehends size differences much more effectively than color, when the color scale is along the same spectrum (ie, various blues as opposed to discrete individual colors).
3 - Requires the user to scan the full list and mathematically compare each individual number while scanning. No real meaningful relationship between tags without a lot of work on the users part.
So, going with #2, there are several considerations to take into account:
Keep the tags alphabetical. This affords the user another method of searching and establishes a known relationship between each (assuming they know the alphabet!). If they're unordered, it's just a crapshoot to find a single one.
If size comparison is absolutely critical (this usually isn't the case, as you can scale up each level by a certain percentage or pixel amount), use a monospaced font. Otherwise, certain letter combinations may end up looking larger than they actually are.
Don't include any commas, pipes, or other dividers. You're already going to have a lot of data in a small area - no need to clutter it up with debris. Space the tags out with a decent amount of padding, of course. Just don't double the number of visual elements by adding more than just the data.
Set a min/max font size and scale between those. There are situations where one tag may be so popular that visually it may appear exponentially larger than the others. Likewise, you don't want a tag to end up rendering at 1px! Set the min/max and adjust between as necessary.
size adjusted voroni diagram
- it shows which tags are inter-related
My favorite tag cloud format is the Wordle format. It looks great and it also does a pretty good job of fitting a lot of tags in a small space.