i am trying to figure out how this software works:
http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/
specifically, i would like to know how it changes the colors on your machine, and also was wondering if this would be possible to do in vb.net?
Most likely they play around with color management. Graphical operating systems allow for color calibration which changes the look of colors on a display. This is primarily used so the display has exactly the same color gamut as printers for design purposes or that the display has natural-looking colors. In this case it is used to adjust the color temperature programmatically.
In the FAQ they state "Currently, we don't recommend running f.lux on calibrated systems running Windows" which seems to reinforce the idea that they are messing with the color calibration (and are probably replacing the one you did previously).
Windows has support for this beginning with Vista and you probably can use this with VB.NET but not natively from .NET, meaning you will have to use the API directly. Here is an introduction about the Windows Color System on MSDN.
Note: Tried it out. Yes, they do mess with the color calibration. And they're pretty aggressive in that regard. Whenever I click "Reload current calibrations" in the color management panel to get my own calibration back (Windows 7 here) it gets reset by f.lux. It seems they are setting this about once a second. Now imagine there are two programs doing this :-)
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I am new in VB application and can't figure out what's wrong with my app. There is a form which has a couple of labels and text fields. When I run the app on my and few other folks's machines it displays fine with proper alignment and font. However, for some people application form UI is broken unaligned text and buttons. Any one have any idea what's wrong with my application?
Okay, After some research, we found that the display settings for those users were set to 125% and because of that there were UI issues. I changed the display settings back to 100% and Booom it works just fine. Thank you all for you help.
This problem can occur for a number of reasons.
In my experience, however, it is commonly caused by setting the Font on controls, only to discover that certain users do not have that font installed on their machines. As a result, Windows forms selects a font for you that it believes is a close approximation--usually with horrifying results. Widths don't match, and controls end up horribly aligned.
Make sure you are not using a font that is not built into the OS. If you are designing the application in Windows 7, for example, and shipping to multiple platforms (Windows 2000, Windows XP (the horror!), and Windows 8), you may find that font availability is drastically different on these various platforms.
Though not aesthetically pleasing, stick with the lowest common denominator in these cases. If you can, use Segoe UI, which should be present on all these platforms (except XP) and which Microsoft now recommends.
I recently upgraded my system to Windows 7 Professional. Furthermore, I recently upgraded from VB6 to VB.NET and I've been working with forms and control under the new interface. Controls such as text boxes and tab controls are washed out and very difficult to see.
In my attempt to remedy the situation, I personalized my display by unchecking the box under "Windows Color" entitled "Enable transparency" and adjusting the Color Intensity slider all the way to the right. But no matter what I try to do, I still get washed-out form colors.
Is there a setting for adjusting the default form colors? What am I missing?
It seems to me that you have a couple of choices, all of which you probably won't like.
Change your Textbox BorderStyle from Fixed3D to FixedSingle, this will give you a more pronounced border around the textboxes (no such property on comboboxes though). This will also make your textboxes look a lot more 'flat', which you may not want.
Change either the background of your form or the background of your controls, thereby providing a better contrast between the two. Even slight variations on the same color would help.
Purchase (or make your own) custom controls that have built-in style changing abilities. I use the Telerik controls sometimes. They have the ability to let you change the UI Element's styles, including all kinds of colors and different borders and such. The issue with this option is a lot of these custom controls are overly expensive, although you can find decent ones for fairly cheap sometimes (I found a control set once that was pretty nice for $19).
Whatever you decide to do, you have to remember that your form will look different to users that are using different operating systems than what you're developing on. You noticed a big change when you went from (I'm assuming) Windows XP to Windows 7 right? You have to remember to test your application on all operating systems that your application will be expected to run on. You could design it beautifully on Windows 7 and it may look horrible on XP. You may be able to ignore OSs that are older than XP, but for the time being almost 50% of users still use XP (last I checked).
BTW, there is no setting for adjusting the default form colors... this just happens to be how forms look on Windows 7. I found it an adjustment when I went from XP to Win7, but you get used to it. I very rarely make the background of my controls the same color as the background of my form just because of this... oh, and don't go changing your display, you want to see what your users are going to see - otherwise you'll end up with something that only looks good on your computer. :)
We're facing a strange problem here. One of our users cannot see two buttons on a form, that everybody else can see. I'm not sure if the buttons are not there or the window is smaller than it should be. The size of this window is fixed, so it cannot be adjusted manually. (it is like a pop-up window informt of the main window)
Our application is used by employees of our company all over the world. So they all have windows xp in different languages and their regional settings differ. But I can't see how that would make a difference.
Does anyone have an idea?
A reason for this might be that the user changed the DPI setting on its machine. Typically you would change that in the control panel, in the Display settings you can choose to have a font size of 100%, 125% and 150%. This affects the DPI and might push winforms controls further down the form, making them "invisible" (below the bottom boundary of the form).
Here are instructions on how to change DPI settings on Windows XP.
If this is the cause for your problem, you have to make sure your forms scale properly. Look at the MSDN documentation for automatic scaling.
I've seen in some applications the control in these shots that is used to enter key shortcuts. I'd like to know if these are standard (available to everyone) or if these were built by the application's developer. I don't think it is the latter because I've seen this in many apps from different developers. Here are the images:
To give one example of an app try Bowtie, though I know there's more that use this.
If this control is standard, could you tell me how to use it (what class, etc)?
The first one appears to be Shortcut Recorder from Waffle Software.
Note that the use of a rounded text field for this, while somewhat established, the HIG reserves the rounded appearance for search fields.
I have a Windows Phone 7 application and I regularly see "weird" UI glitches that take me AGES to debug. It's a range of issues like controls appearing to have extra margin, scrollbars not appearing, animations looking really glitchy, entire page scrolled down, combobox items offset, etc. etc.
I'm happy to admit it might be me - but how to you debug UI errors like this? I know there's Silverlight Spy for the PC Silverlight Apps. Is there anything like this for Windows Phone 7?
Any debugging tips v much appreciated.
I have found that it is a good idea to start with Windows Phone 7 Design Templates, adopt a version control system right from day one of the project and to edit the XAML, use Expression Blend. The Visual Studio is great for writing code, but, to harness the real power of the tools, Expression Blend is the best to style your application.
HTH,
indyfromoz
Here are some tips:
Many people have issues with the emulator due to their graphics card.
Things like slow animations and ui glitches are very common.
Check that your graphics card is Direct X 10.1 at least and that your Driver
Model is WDDM 1.1
Make sure you have the latest drivers.
Windows 7 has less issues with the emulator than Vista
Make sure you have the latest tools, get the RTM release from the website.
In the RTM release, the frame rate counters are displayed by default in a vertical bar on the left, you should monitor these to check for performance issues
Here are a couple of things which I normally do... none of them are real smart, but sharing nevertheless.
Deploy it after every 2-3 controls that you add and ensure things are correctly laying out.
If by chance it doesn't work the way I am expecting it to, I have a parallel Silverlight 3 project running in which I typically paste the XAML and see if it works fine.
After that, I typically check it out as a Silverlight project since even I am not sure of any tools available for Win Phone 7.
I have favorited this question and I hope someone points us to something more interesting.
There's a lot you can checkout with Blend as Indy suggests. This is really good advice.
Regarding some of your specific issues these aren't necessarily glitches. I'll comment on a couple that stand out.
Extra margin - this and padding are built into the metro controls by design. Again, in blend you can dig into this by retemplating the control and changing properties of objects within the control.
The procedure for this is rclick the control, edit template, edit a copy. Then you can look at the different states and objects and change things as suits. While doing this please keep in mind the App Certification Requirements and UI Design Guidelines.
Regarding scrollbars, these are by design hidden until you start scrolling. You can control their availability with Horizontal/VerticalScrollBarVisibility on relevant controls (or on the ScrollViewer embedded in some controls - again retemplate in blend).
Combobox isn't metro themed so is going to struggle in the fitting in department, but there are posts around where people have done work on this. ListPicker is a better fit imo from the Windows Phone Toolkit released with the RTM tools.
If you can't see any obvious causes for the glitches in your code the first thing I would recommend is to actually test your app on a real device. Somethings - particularly animated objects -don't always look exactly the same when you run them on a device.
I thought I had a animation glitch in one of my apps but it only appears in the emulator. When I run on an actual device I don't see it.
Of course this doesn't help you if you can't get a phone to test it on yet, but before you potentially waste hours trying to debug a problem you might not have I would work on the rest of the app until such time as you can test the app on a real phone.
The same goes for anyone creating animations - don't waste time perfecting animations in the emulator. The timings will almost certainly be different on the actual device, so wait till you have one to test on.