Michael's dashboard

This has been suggested many times:

http://getsatisfaction.com/balsamiq/t...

This is a great technique for cases where you want to disable a lot of UI all at once. For example:

Michael,
You can make any control look disabled by putting a rectangle/canvas in front of it and by setting the opacity and turning off the border.



I am sure Peldi will add the disabled state, but this will work in the meantime.

"I don't want Mockups to let people design things that cannot be built"

I understand this argument, but yet I am not sure I agree. Mockups should be simple for sure - but should not try to control what I can do from this ideology. We need to move technology forward, no constrict it. – Michael, on November 30, 2008 14:04

This is again where I feel that an online sharing portal of reusable community created mockups is what is needed. I think that you can just about recreate anything in mockups (ribbon UI for example), and people just need a quick framework to start with.

Perhaps you and I need to finish that community portal. – Michael, on November 30, 2008 13:59

It raises in interesting question. Is Mockups designed for Web or Desktop UI? I feel that Mockups should abstract itself away from whatever medium and not one over the other.

Why another control then? If you just allowed a break escape character, I think it would satisfy the need. – Michael, on November 30, 2008 13:29

Why dont you think newline (<br />) is possible in a real datagrid? I do it all the time in html tables. – Michael, on November 30, 2008 13:20

I've been wanting to have a newline capability for some of the UI components as well. Mainly the data grid.

Michael,
GetSatisfaction does not handle XML tags very well and tries to strip them out. What you have to do is edit your BMML in a separate text editor and find and replace all the close and open brackets before pasting it here.

Find '<' Replace '&lt;'
Find '>' Replace '&gt;'

See this post:

http://getsatisfaction.com/balsamiq/t...

I have a component you can drop in for this:



<mockup version="1.0" skin="sketch">
<controls>
<control controlID="0" controlTypeID="__group__" x="314" y="247" w="-1" h="-1" zOrder="0" locked="false" isInGroup="-1">
<groupChildrenDescriptors>
<control controlID="0" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="58" y="0" w="30" h="-1" zOrder="0" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%201</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="1" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="88" y="0" w="33" h="-1" zOrder="1" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%202</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="2" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="121" y="0" w="31" h="-1" zOrder="2" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%203</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="3" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::Label" x="152" y="0" w="-1" h="-1" zOrder="3" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>...</text>
<size>18</size>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="4" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="181" y="0" w="33" h="-1" zOrder="4" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%207</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="5" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="214" y="0" w="33" h="-1" zOrder="5" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%208</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="6" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="247" y="0" w="34" h="-1" zOrder="6" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%209</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="7" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="0" y="0" w="58" h="-1" zOrder="7" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>%3C%20Prev</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
<control controlID="8" controlTypeID="com.balsamiq.mockups::TextInput" x="281" y="0" w="58" h="-1" zOrder="8" locked="false" isInGroup="9">
<controlProperties>
<text>Next%20%3E</text>
</controlProperties>
</control>
</groupChildrenDescriptors>
</control>
</controls>
</mockup>

Yes - I realize that, I was just giving you a work around.

Use the rectangle canvas and drop an icon on top of it:

Oh - I get it, you need to right justify! How clever. – Michael, on November 27, 2008 15:06

...re: horizontal positioning of tabs - that's there already.
thanks for the rest...

Are you sure? This is what I meant:



If this is possible, I must be missing something.

You can create an icon today with some imagination

It took only a few minutes to create a mockup, however it was a bit hard to do. Plus there is some icons and and such that just don't exist. I do think it would be good to have a few new UI components and icons to make it easier.

But I'm no expert at the Ribbon Bar so I don't know what people want. I would say to try and replicate the above and you will see whats missing and/or could be made easier. Here are a few ideas:

- Enhance the tabs to allow for square shaped tabs.
- Enhance the tabs to allow the horizontal adjustment of the first tab
- Create an icon to represent the big round MS icon in the upper left corner
- Create a new ribbonbar container

Wow - works great - thanks!