User interface oddities

[Michael Bulgrien]

Pinned New Session Button Panel

have you considered Visual Studio's dockable controls that can be pinned open

On second thought, I think that perhaps it is the button panel that could be expanded or collapsed. If someone is using the session tree, they could collapse the new session button panel to give the session tree more real estate.

See mockup's below

P.S. In the mockup, I used Microsoft Smartphone font: nina.ttf

[Michael Bulgrien]

Tim (Scooter)

The images are not showing in my last post. Could you look into it please? In the mean time, here are some hyperlinks:

Pinned
Unpinned

[Chris]

Michael,

The reason they aren't showing is because the slashes in your URLs are backwards.

If you change the \ slashes to a / instead, it should work.

Pinned:

Unpinned:

[Michael Bulgrien]

The reason they aren't showing is because the slashes in your URLs are backwards.

Oops! Can't believe that one slipped by. I pasted the links in IE and it opened them just fine...so I didn't realize I had mis-keyed the slashes.

[Tom]

I pasted the links in IE and it opened them just fine...so I didn't realize I had mis-keyed the slashes.

IE's pretty forgiving -- that's both good and bad, because it can teach newbies bad habits. (I know you're not a newbie, FWIW, Michael.)

The collapsible or dockable button bar is a neat approach -- it does give more room to the details panel and the treeview -- but maybe there's a way to see more of the dir tree when the buttons are visible too. It just "feels" cramped since the first two levels of nesting are often descriptive, meaning the actual items of interest are often indented a couple times already.

I know it's a lot more work to simulate a treeview, so if that's the only reason you didn't depict it as being wider that's not a problem.

[Michael Bulgrien]

maybe there's a way to see more of the dir tree when the buttons are visible too.

My mockup was intended to show what difference a collapsable button pad could make in a minimally sized window. The way to see more of the dir tree when the buttons are visible is for the user to use a bigger window, or for the Scooter team to redesign how the tabbed control works.