The control is quite good at the moment but as of the CTP release it is missing quite a lot of goodies. Listed below are some of my suggestions for the control.
1) Double clicking at the top of the control should make it expand full screen. Similarly double clicking at the top of an already fully expanded window should make it go back to its normal form. Hope im making sense here
2) Possible docking areas for the control?
3) Ability to easily open the window on clientside and server side
4) Position the dialog at certain parts of the screen. For instance I would like to set a dialog to appear dead center of the screen or even change it to appear at the bottom right.
5) Loads of skins especially Vista and office themed skins.
6) Custom header templates. So I can add additional stuff where the maxmimise and minimise parts are.
7) Transition effect, right now we have a nice fade in effect. What about a sliding effect.
7) Confirmation box, alert box, promt box and notification box.
The notification one would be unique as it would work like the win alert popup. Its the notification effect you get when you receive a new email via outlook (bottom right). Developers can customise the header and add options there. Making the position and transition effect changeable would mean that we could replicate the notification effect. You might want to even make it its own seperate control.
Michael Josiah said: 6) Custom header templates. So I can add additional stuff where the maxmimise and minimise parts are.
Another great question. We actually had a pretty big debate about this very feature internally, and in the end we decided that we really did not understand what customers want to do with the header template, so rather than guess and get it wrong, but be stuck with it forever, we decided to leave it out of the CTP and get more info on how customers would use it. So, that said Michael, can you provide a bit more info on exactly what you want to do with a header template? Do you want full control over the entite header (min/max/close buttons, caption text, header icon, etc) or do you just want to format the header text? Do you want to move the control buttons around? More details the better with this one, especially if you can describe specifically what you are trying to do with the header.
Michael Josiah said: 7) Transition effect, right now we have a nice fade in effect. What about a sliding effect. 7) Confirmation box, alert box, promt box and notification box.
Noted...
Michael Josiah said: The notification one would be unique as it would work like the win alert popup. Its the notification effect you get when you receive a new email via outlook (bottom right). Developers can customise the header and add options there. Making the position and transition effect changeable would mean that we could replicate the notification effect. You might want to even make it its own seperate control.
Regarding popup window, this may somewhat fall into the same discussion of scenario specific vs monolythic controls that I posted in your previous post, so feedback on what you want to see would be great.
Devin
Devin Rader said:Another great question. We actually had a pretty big debate about this very feature internally, and in the end we decided that we really did not understand what customers want to do with the header template, so rather than guess and get it wrong, but be stuck with it forever, we decided to leave it out of the CTP and get more info on how customers would use it. So, that said Michael, can you provide a bit more info on exactly what you want to do with a header template? Do you want full control over the entite header (min/max/close buttons, caption text, header icon, etc) or do you just want to format the header text? Do you want to move the control buttons around? More details the better with this one, especially if you can describe specifically what you are trying to do with the header.
The ability to decide which icons if any should be displayed. For instance there might be a scenario whereby I dont want users to open the window full screen or minimise it. It that situation I should be able to select what functions in the header that I want visible to the user. Also there are scenarios where you would want to add your own custom icon that serves a unique feature.
With regards to the outlook style alert control, I would make it exist as its own control. There are some advantages to this such as
a) give the beneficial perception of an increased number of available controls
b) Reduce the complexity of the dialog control by not having the additional burden of transforming into a message alert
c) Allow you to grow the two controls at their own pace and add features that would be best suited for the individual control. For instance the message alert would need to a built in timer feature so that at certain intervals the control could check for some sort of programmed state and respond accordingly.
d) You have a winforms version of this control so you could use the lessons learnt from that development to produce a pretty solid messaging alert control
The main thing I would sugggest with the types of controls being developed for Aikido is to focus on producing the equivilent winform controls that are light and cross browser. Most of us web application developers strive to replicate winform functionality on a website. Thus controls like the splitter, dialog, webcombo, messenging alert are perfect in helping us to acheive that. For instance with the current IG controls (not aikido) can you replicate as closely as possible the outlook 2007 email client. The answer is sort of, but not quite. The weblistbar cant reproduce the same navigation, the lack of a splitter makes it impossible to divide the required panes, no messenging alert means you cannot replicate that feature and no sliding panes means you cannot replicate that one either. So with IG alone I cannot replicate well known (Microsoft) win applications. There are no excuses on this front as I am able to do this with other vendors components quite easily. Once you have a suite that allows me to replicate winforms then you will have a pretty special set of controls that people like moi would continue to subscribe and go nuts for. Honestly the controls that we are all shouting out for and the features too have all been done on winform applications. Outlook is the perfect example as it mixes pretty much EVERY control and feature that we need. Why not start from there as the basic.