102 replies to this topic

[samm565]

I tried to make an interesting winery interface, i don't like it much.

[syao]

As I look at the mockups posted here all that comes to my mind is the word 'colorfest'.  And the word 'windows' (where every application has its own colors and its own way to position buttons and stuff).  Then I decided to look at the apps in my /Applications folder, to see how many of them had a custom background.  They were quite a lot, but they have one thing in common.
Have a look (warn: 2.2MB jpg)
Can you guess what it is?

Spoiler

Answer: colors aren't the dominant thing in those UIs.  You don't have to search for buttons/window controls in a sea of colors that make you blind.  Colors and backgrounds are just to make it look better, they shouldn't be distracting. I'm not against custom backgrounds, as long as they're functional. I'd just love to see more apps that don't look like a carnival of custom backgrounds and custom controls.

Just my two cents.

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 13 April 2012 - 04:55 PM, said:

I tried to make an interesting winery interface, i don't like it much.

That would look cool if you apply the wood to the whole windows

[Battlefiler]

i dont like the wood sorry my friend

but i think i could sent you a good idea for the design

[samm565]

Battlefiler, on 13 April 2012 - 09:00 PM, said:

i dont like the wood sorry my friend

but i think i could sent you a good idea for the design

I don't like it much either, i said that above. But i just thought i'd post it anyway.

[samm565]

syao, on 13 April 2012 - 06:23 PM, said:

As I look at the mockups posted here all that comes to my mind is the word 'colorfest'.  And the word 'windows' (where every application has its own colors and its own way to position buttons and stuff).  Then I decided to look at the apps in my /Applications folder, to see how many of them had a custom background.  They were quite a lot, but they have one thing in common.
Have a look (warn: 2.2MB jpg)
Can you guess what it is?

Spoiler

Answer: colors aren't the dominant thing in those UIs.  You don't have to search for buttons/window controls in a sea of colors that make you blind.  Colors and backgrounds are just to make it look better, they shouldn't be distracting. I'm not against custom backgrounds, as long as they're functional. I'd just love to see more apps that don't look like a carnival of custom backgrounds and custom controls.

Just my two cents.

True, my best concepts are the ones without much colour.

Like these.

Spoiler

CiderX Central (ignore title bar name)

Installer v2.0

Wineskin Redesign

Winery Redesign

But colour is sometimes good.

Spoiler

and then very bad (i'v done a lot more bad interfaces, just to ashamed to show them ).

Spoiler

p.s I hate steam interface. So buggy and the scrolling is screwed up, pretty much windows for ya.

[samm565]

syao, on 13 April 2012 - 06:23 PM, said:

Then I decided to look at the apps in my /Applications folder, to see how many of them had a custom background.  They were quite a lot, but they have one thing in common.
Have a look (warn: 2.2MB jpg)

See, all the interfaces that are in that picture have barely any colour at all. They either are dark grey or light grey (some are a very white blue, almost looks like grey).

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 13 April 2012 - 07:58 PM, said:

That would look cool if you apply the wood to the whole windows

Do you mean with the shelves or just using the background.

[Battlefiler]

i like you CiderX UI. This a little bit smaller and i guess people like fancy and easy UI's.

and if we have an perfect wine theme it would be soo cool

[samm565]

Battlefiler, on 14 April 2012 - 07:19 AM, said:

i like you CiderX UI. This a little bit smaller and i guess people like fancy and easy UI's.

and if we have an perfect wine theme it would be soo cool

I spent about 6 hours on the ciderX ui, and then a bit more time changing things because some things people didn't like and all that stuff long time.

Big isn't always better, if you can have a interface that is small that has all the features of the big interface, and still as easy to use, then why not, it gives the user more space for other apps.

What do you mean perfect wine theme?


Im not a fan of anything distracting, i like my interfaces simplistic and minimalistic, and to not have anything over done. I see a lot of interfaces that people make that think that making things look as fancy as possible is a good thing. Not always. Even with my ciderX interface design, NSObject and Drakulix had lots of problems trying to get the interface looking like mine, because things wouldn't work and they were spending a long time on the interface and not the program itself. Which sucks for them. I tried making an interface that was super fancy, i think the image is above,it's really colourful and that was my 1st concept for installer, i think almost everybody said that it was distracting, hard to read, not like a mac app and things like that.

I think that final cut pro x is very annoying sometimes. Because of all the animations in the interface that apple puts in their to make it smooth, don't even run smooth on my computer, they lag a bit and the scrolling is f***** up, in safari and finder and lots of other apps on my computer the scrolling is super smooth, but in final cut it gets laggy because its trying to scroll heaps of images that make up the interface, because apple tried to make it look so different and not good, iMovie runs heaps better, but its a shame it doesn't have all the features like colour correction and colour matching and lots of others that i can't think of.

[Battlefiler]

yea youre right but i mean that the ciderx must be smaller for wineskin

and you can setup windows themes on wine. Its very buggy at the moment but (i have forgot his name) have found an very nich lion theme.

with fancy i mean hyper stylish UI i mean simple and one colored ui's (like the app store)

ps: is it easyer for coders with unity3d design ?

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 14 April 2012 - 05:53 AM, said:

Do you mean with the shelves or just using the background.

I meant the selves

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 02:18 PM, said:

I meant the selves

I don't know how i would do the engines if i had shelves going across the entire window.

Anyway, i made another interface concept for wineskin+winery. Its similar to how to ciderX central, because you can manage projects and everything like that, I'm not in a typing mood, so I'm not going to explain everything. But if you have any questions about it, i'll be happy to answer them.


Suggestions please...

p.s Its not finished.

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 14 April 2012 - 02:23 PM, said:

I don't know how i would do the engines if i had shelves going across the entire window.

Anyway, i made another interface concept for wineskin+winery. Its similar to how to ciderX central, because you can manage projects and everything like that, I'm not in a typing mood, so I'm not going to explain everything. But if you have any questions about it, i'll be happy to answer them.


Suggestions please...

p.s Its not finished.

Now thats just over complicating winery . Its better as it is .
a gui like that would over complicate winery and winery source code .
looking at the prevouis mock up app you created. It seems you aren't building your gui in the winery source code.

If you are going to make gui for winery/wineskin  . I would suggest you clone the wine git from source forge and work directly with the actual source code

Also could i get a psd file of that gui. I want to try applying it to winery

[samm565]

ATTENTION PEOPLE THAT KNOW STUFF This interface uses helvetica neue, so does that mean for people without this font installed on their computer this interface would look weird? Or does it save the font in the app?

The 1st version of this interface was done entirely in photoshop and the image above has one photoshop image (background) and the rest is in Xcode, hence no cool subtle embossing to the text, it looks clearer anyway, so thats a plus.

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 14 April 2012 - 03:05 PM, said:

ATTENTION PEOPLE THAT KNOW STUFF This interface uses helvetica neue, so does that mean for people without this font installed on their computer this interface would look weird? Or does it save the font in the app?

The 1st version of this interface was done entirely in photoshop and the image above has one photoshop image (background) and the rest is in Xcode, hence no cool subtle embossing to the text, it looks clearer anyway, so thats a plus.

No it does not save with the app unless you decide to include it in the app
But if you didnt download the font and the font came with your Mac. Every Mac user there're has that font

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 03:15 PM, said:

No it does not save with the app unless you decide to include it in the app
But if you didnt download the font and the font came with your Mac. Every Mac user there're has that font

Ok thanks, i don think helvetica neue came with my mac, i think its part of photoshop. So i'd have to put it in the app, i might not be able to do that either.

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 14 April 2012 - 04:15 PM, said:

Ok thanks, i don think helvetica neue came with my mac, i think its part of photoshop. So i'd have to put it in the app, i might not be able to do that either.

why not .. just go to your font folder and copy the font into the app
oh can i still get a psd of that cool interface

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 02:34 PM, said:

Now thats just over complicating winery . Its better as it is .
a gui like that would over complicate winery and winery source code .
looking at the prevouis mock up app you created. It seems you aren't building your gui in the winery source code.

If you are going to make gui for winery/wineskin  . I would suggest you clone the wine git from source forge and work directly with the actual source code

Also could i get a psd file of that gui. I want to try applying it to winery

Yeh, true. It would make it more complicated. I'll give you the background and those things on top.

Here it is if anybody wants it.

Spoiler

and the wood by itself, this was originally a pic i found on google images but i have edited heaps.

Spoiler

And the unedited wood image

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 04:19 PM, said:

why not .. just go to your font folder and copy the font into the app
oh can i still get a psd of that cool interface

do you still want the psd or is them 2 images good enough.

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 14 April 2012 - 04:34 PM, said:

do you still want the psd or is them 2 images good enough.

2 images is good enough
I am going to add it to the custom wines kin winery I am releasing for the infinity project

[syao]

Helvetica Neue comes with OS X, no need to bundle it in the app.
10.6: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5154
10.7: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5098
Edit: it's there in the developer preview of 10.8 as well, I just checked it.

If it didn't, you couldn't bundle it with the app, since as far as I know it's a commercial font, and you'd have to pay for a license.

[samm565]

Changed my mind, I'll put the PSD up too. I spent 5 mins naming all the layers and grouping them because it would be confusing for people when everything has names like shape1, shape 2, layer 5 copy copy, layer 6. Sometimes i can't be bothered naming stuff .

Click here to download .psd File (1.3mb).

[samm565]

syao, on 14 April 2012 - 04:35 PM, said:

Helvetica Neue comes with OS X, no need to bundle it in the app.
10.6: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5154
10.7: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5098
Edit: it's there in the developer preview of 10.8 as well, I just checked it.

If it didn't, you couldn't bundle it with the app, since as far as I know it's a commercial font, and you'd have to pay for a license.

Yeah, i didn't think i could bundle it in the app if it came with photoshop.

It's good that it comes with mac os x, ultra light looks so good.

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 04:35 PM, said:

2 images is good enough
I am going to add it to the custom wines kin winery I am releasing for the infinity project

i uploaded the psd anyway

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 02:34 PM, said:

If you are going to make gui for winery/wineskin  . I would suggest you clone the wine git from source forge and work directly with the actual source code

That would be easier if i did actually know how to use Xcode properly, i know how to us interface builder form practise, and i don't know any code except for a few lines of action script and a little bit of javascript. So i usually stick to photoshop and use Xcode to add buttons on top of my concepts if i need. Sometimes i just photoshop lion ui buttons into the interface in photoshop, I'm a bit lazy

[hmtinc]

samm565, on 14 April 2012 - 04:52 PM, said:

That would be easier if i did actually know how to use Xcode properly, i know how to us interface builder form practise, and i don't know any code except for a few lines of action script and a little bit of javascript. So i usually stick to photoshop and use Xcode to add buttons on top of my concepts if i need. Sometimes i just photoshop lion ui buttons into the interface in photoshop, I'm a bit lazy

TIp : you should consider learning to program in Xcode it can be very useful one day
anyway i used you design to make a more simper actual working version of wineskin winery
you can download app here http://www.mediafire...yu0x8zf3bgc5nue

heres a preview of app

[doh123]

I really dislike wood look...

[samm565]

doh123, on 14 April 2012 - 05:55 PM, said:

I really dislike wood look...

Yeh, i thought of wood because its like what you would have at a winery lol.

I have no idea on how to make it look much better than you have it now, you could change a few things around, but the look of your is already so good. I think you should open a thread on a wineskin, where people can post concepts and maybe somebody will make something that will be amazing. Also people (including me ) wont be posting wineskin concepts on an installer thread.

I think instead of a new window popping up when you click create new wrapper, it should do the same thing as when you press cmd+p or cmd+shift+s in your web browser. You know what i mean? that little thing that slides down? I think that would be better.

[samm565]

hmtinc, on 14 April 2012 - 05:23 PM, said:

TIp : you should consider learning to program in Xcode it can be very useful one day
anyway i used you design to make a more simper actual working version of wineskin winery
you can download app here http://www.mediafire...yu0x8zf3bgc5nue

If you want better screenshots of apps you should press cmd+shift+4 then space and click on a window you want to take a screen shot of. Then the screenshots have shadows and cool stuff.

Im not a programming person, i'm still in school and I'm going to be a graphic designer when i finish. So i don't think Xcode and programming is something that i need to learn, i may learn it in the future, but for now i can't be bothered learning to program in Xcode on top of all my school work.

I don't think custom backgrounds and Xcode UI go very well together. I'm going to think about this for the next few days and see if i can come up with anything.

I think the current wineskin looks better...

Spoiler