More UI Work

The majority of the past couple of days have been spent arranging and rearranging the graphical UI elements of NumMemorize.  Yes, I fret too much over the GUI.

The main view now looks like this:

If you compare this to the old view, you will see a differnce in the font and especially the rendering of the symbols:

I definitely like the symbols better this way, although the center column could have been left untouched.  I’ll be curious to see the comments from the users.

The second view has changed quite a bit too:

I won’t go over the different controls and textual displays right now.  Suffice it to say that pretty much everything you see is actually connected and functional.  I even have keyboard hinting working – once the user has made too many mistakes or is out of time, the key will start flashing the next digits of the number as a way to teach the user additional digits.

What remains to be done:

• an “About” view linked to the little “i” in the main window
• a small animated clock/timer graphic to signify the time left before the user has to press a key or entry mode ends (and teaching mode begins).
• fix this (see i to the power of i):
  

I am also pleased to announce, that our little app here now sports its own icon.  I have to add that this icon took me almost a whole day to design, no thanks to Adobe products.  For some reason none of the Adobe CS products launch on my MacBook anymore.  They open and quit.  Neither does Photoshop Elements.  I spent an hour or more deleting and reinstalling Photoshop CS, and I had the same issue.  I downloaded a number of other graphic and icon editing apps, but then I realized that GraphicConverter, right under my own nose, is fully capable of creating graphics suitable for this purpose.  Thanks Thorsten Lemke!

One last comment before I call it a night.  Quite often I find a need to look at a string of text in all different fonts in order to pick the most suitable rendering.  The icon above was created by going through many, many fonts, one-at-a-time, in order to find the right one.  I wish there was a way to either say, take this string and run through each font automatically, pausing between each, or to render the string in all possible fonts, in one document, and then allowing me to delete ones I dislike or copy the one I do.  Is there such an app, or a feature in an existing app?

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