I'm a graphic designer/web-UI designer by trade but have some (albeit limited) knowledge of Access. I haven't used it for a few years now but have been asked by a company to redesign the front end of their split database that was built using Access 2010. They had a programmer design the whole database, and it works well, but they do not like the actual appearance of the front-end so they have asked me to update it with some 'modern design' so-to-speak (i.e. stylise the buttons, fieds etc.)
I'm just wondering, what options do I have with this? Is there any way to use CSS as such to stylise the front-end? Or is there any built-in design tools that are useful? I plan to produce concepts using Photoshop to show them but it's knowing the limitations of what can be done with Access in terms of the front-end design. Any help would be appreciated!
It can be done, but it's a major task because Access isn't designed for developers (not to mention graphic designers) but for superusers. Thus, tools like you have in, say, Visual Studio, you can only dream of.
But if you are prepared to spend hours with alignment near pixel level, it can be done - as you may get an impression of from the screenshots here:
Modern/Metro style message box and input box for Microsoft Access 2013
Indeed, design of subforms is a challenge as these are offset a few pixels when embedded in the main form; if you are to accuracy to the pixel, this will hurt your eyes. Also, listboxes have a habit of shift their layout slightly when required - just to mention a few of the tasks you will encounter. In fact, once you have made some neat forms and controls, the only tool you have to ease your work, is to copy and paste these when you need a new form or control.
The icons are from the SyncFusion Metro libraray, colours are strict to the MS Metro/Modern palette, and fonts and proportions are as close to the Microsoft design guide as possible. This was chosen for two reasons: First, the design guide is so thorough and well thought out, and second, I had no reason to believe I could do it better. That may be different for you, of course.
The application was for a custom project, and users' response was positive only, even from Mac users (using Remote Desktop) - they love the colours.
Access is built to be GUI-intuitive. There's no 3rd party tools to "pretty" it up, only to improve the functionality.
That being said, there's plenty of stuff you can do to improve the look of it. Drop an Option Group down, delete the label, change the Special Effect to "Flat" and the Border Color to dark blue and you've got a nice little box to keep relevant controls grouped together. Utilize the Back Color of the form to give it a little more appeal; I always find a softer "slate" blue looks appealing and professional. White or soft yellow text looks nice on that background.
Add a label that stretches all the way across the top of the form. Make its background color a darker blue and center the text for a very appealing "header" for your form, or you can do the same thing inside those option groups I mentioned above.
Most coders I've ever worked with were pretty happy making dull gray forms with non-aligned textboxes and calling it a day. Take a little time to snazz it up with a few ideas I've given (and any you can make up yourself) and it goes a long way towards presenting an application that people don't dread using.
Here are few other UI components that "..are possible" without installation GitHubPage
Related
I'd like to have the users desktop or whatever windows they have open show through the background with a slight bit of opacity. I did a quick mockup in photoshop to try and illustrate what I'm aiming for
I'm fine with using a bit of jQuery if need be, but would prefer to keep the foot print light. I don't really want to add a ton of overhead just for a fancy effect.
No. You cannot make the browser window translucent.
This is completely impossible... using current APIs. It's theoretically possible that one might be implemented in the future, but for now, the best you can do is transparency to the user desired color.
I doubt this is possible since it requires the actual browser window to be transparent, which is almost surely not the case.
Maybe with some plugin for the browser, but not by code in your website.
No, this is impossible.
99.99% of the time, if you've never seen it before, there's a good reason*.
*EDIT: These comments are specific to web programming... not meant to apply to the sum total of human innovation.
The term is Form Opacity, and you have to have access to the applications source code, in most cases to manipulate it. Several programs already have this as a standard or hidden feature, i.e. Trillian, and iCalenderLite, to name a couple.... Windows 7 allows you to do it to any open window.
form.opacity
EDIT: Answer has been getting downvoted without comment, so I added the OP's and my additional remarks here.
Would this still be out of bounds for a website to change though? FREX I couldn't have my website turn form opacity on (just for site X) if it wasn't already? – aslum Jun 7 '11 at 23:33
For that, I would have to say "not possible", unless it was a "live" control, loaded by the browser to begin with. You most likely would not be able to do it on a "by site" basis only. And even though most user initiated events are "technically" replicable via script or code, proper security levels, would render such an event, inaccessible to outside manipulation. – tahwos Jun 8 '11 at 22:04
I am seeing a lot of this is impossible. The correct answer is currently mostly impossible ;) Using programming, you can create a window or application that is transparent. I have never done anything of the sort, but I have used several programs that allow you to control transparency.
My best bet for controlling opacity of a window is DirectX. So If you were to make a browser with DirectX, you could control the opacity of the window by reading the CSS.
So basicly, you could do it your self, much like mozilla firefox reads their own css (-moz-radius) just make your own DirectX based Web browser. I could see someone getting a lot of support on a project like that.
I've been asked to make an interactive site map for a local development which has a few houses on it, so users can click on the relevant house within an aerial site layout, and see it's details listed, and whether or not it's sold.
Staff need to be able to mark houses as 'sold'.
It's been a while since I've done anything like this - in the past I would have used flash and had the sold status updated via actionscript and php, but things have moved on. What are some of the most popular methods now?
I've included an example below which is a lot larger scale than what I'm looking to do, but the same principle. I can't work out how they did it though, and I'd really like it to be vector so it can be zoomed into without losing quality, plus have the option to animate things like the popup bubbles etc if the tech allows.
Also, I'd probably be looking to include this in a Kirby CMS site, and hopefully have the updating done through that, but it's fairly flexible.
Thoughts appreciated!
https://www.redrow.co.uk/developments/the-sycamores-162433/interactive-site-map-4803v1
I'm trying to use the PictureChooser plugin, specifically the ChoosePictureFromLibrary method, and I have a few questions.
Is it possible to show more than just .jpg? I'd like at least .png as well, though maybe other picture types too.
Is it possible not to resize chosen pictures? The maxPixelDimension parameter seems to always resize the image to that size.
Is it possible to have access to the original file name of the chosen picture?
The PictureChooser is really quite a small plugin - it really only has one small class per platform - https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross/tree/v3.1/Plugins/Cirrious/PictureChooser
Because of this, the easiest route forwards for your specialist needs is probably to "branch" this small part of the code (by repo-forking or just by "copy and paste"). You should then find it straightforward to get hold of filenames, to avoid resizing, and to add any other features you need on the platforms you need to support.
If you create features that you think others may want, then mvx would love to see them open sourced back to the community - but that's not priority 1 - instead, the most important thing is making your app awesome and shipping it.
Is there any way to create an emboss effect for a tablix, or any other "cool" effects for a tablix in SSRS 2008 R2?
Emboss is not available as an out of the box option with SSRS. IF you really need that effect, you can simulate it by placing rectangles in a table, and then placing a textbox in those. You can then shade different sides of the textbox different colors.
I personally would avoid embossed looking things. I think they usually look bad, especially when printed. If you want to look cool, and keep things easy in SSRS, I recommend these things to go in a more "metro" direction.
Use Color
Choose and use a consistent color palette for a project, across multiple reports. If you aren't a designer-type, go to the company website, and sample some of the colors there.
Typically you can find:
a dark color to use for title text
a lighter color for subheadings
a medium color for occasional accent, such as behind the title, or a line below the title
a much lighter color (used in sidebars on websites) that you can set as the background to your table headers.
Pay attention to Type
Use the same font for all pieces of the report. You might get away with using a different font for the title, but usually it will look bad.
Use Italics and Bold as needed. Italics type should be used for incidental data details, that are not the focus of the report. Bold should be used for titles, sub headings, and a key data element, especially if the data is more than one line long.
Consistent spacing
Report elements that are close in size to each other should be the exact same size. This means that you won't be able to cram as much data in, but the report will be much more pleasant and professional to look at. I try to use either a half inch or .75 inch grid and make everything multiples of that size. BIDS doesn't really support this, so this can involve some typing in of sizes.
If there are graphics, line those up with the grid as much as possible.
If you want to get serious about this, start reading books by Edward Tufte. In particular, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is often considered a classic of information design.
Reports that are developed with this "less is more" attitude will look fresh and usable longer than reports full of distractions, aka Chart Junk.
So I just got an internship at this company, and as a side project, they want me to redesign one of their webpages. On their webpage, they have an image like the following:
Basically, this is an image of a room layout, with different server boxes (white squares) used for testing. When you click on one of the white boxes, it will hyperlink you to a page that has to do with that server box and so forth. The issue is that if they redesign the room, or add server boxes etc, they need to remake a new image, and then change quite a bit of coordinates in a badly written perl script. (I thought this was a bad way to do things, and I recommended trashing the entire image idea in the first place, but they wanted to keep it). Anyway, is there an easier way to do this with code, so that if changes need to be changed, it only involves adding/subtracting lines of code? I was thinking of using some sort of html/css combination, but I don't know if there is a better way to go about doing this... I want to make there diagram a bit more dynamic.
Thank you.
Image Magick is often installed on web servers. Have a look at http://www.imagemagick.org/script/perl-magick.php