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How I build an application - Part 5 - User Interface Design

Submitted by mikehostetler on Thu, 04/26/2007 - 11:53

This article the 5th installment in of a series titled 'How I build an application'. You can find the other installments and subsection here.

Nothing is more critical then the User Interface (UI) of an application. All things come together in the UI. If your database design is top notch, but your UI sucks, your application sucks. Examples of this are all over the computer world.

That being said, I definitely wouldn't consider myself a great UI designer. I can achieve a passing grade, but there are giants in this field that I am constantly bowing to. I work much better with the bottom 90% of the application. I'm the guy who engineers the application with the care of a Ferrari mechanic, but has difficulty with designing the seat to perfectly fit with the driver in a way that makes the car feel like an extension of your body.

How I build an application - Part 4 - Use Cases

Submitted by mikehostetler on Thu, 04/05/2007 - 13:42

This article the 4th installment in of a series titled 'How I build an application'. You can find the other two installments and subsection here.

I've written about my Idea, but before I get into the code, I need to flesh out how the idea is translated into a usable application a bit more. When I come up with an idea, I have a general page flow diagram in my head. Translating that in-memory page flow into code is generally straightforward, and most of the time I can simply sit down and code it.

For the use of this article, that brain dump process is hard to explain. The purpose of this article is to explain that process. Without further ado, here's my page flow diagram created in Microsoft Visio using their Use Case template set.

How I build an application - Part 1

Submitted by mikehostetler on Thu, 03/15/2007 - 21:00

Every few months I get an idea for a neat little application I'd like to have. If somebody hasn't built it yet, I usually take a crack at it in my spare time.

This time around, I found I need a tool to help me plan a weekly menu. I figured it would be cool to blog about it, so here you go. I'll try to describe the steps I move through from start to finish.

The Problem
Being busy and working a lot, I tend to eat a lot of junk. However, cooking is tough. There's the problem of figuring out what I want to eat, the shopping, preparation and finally cooking before I get to the good part, the eating. I want to make that easier. I find the planning part the most time consuming and difficult, so that's where I am focusing.