>>Your interface was really uptown.
>>High density and pretty with low intimidation factor.

Thanks :)

>>I am also appreciating "styles" like Ad-Aware. Granted,
>>it's low density. But there is something about it.
>>Ad-Aware's "tool" bar look and feel is interesting - but big.

That tags with a rather old marketing trick. If you want something to look more valuable, you display it with plenty of space around it. If you place a ring in a case with a hundred other rings that ring looks less valuable then if you take the same ring and place it on a pedestal surrounded with velvet all by itself in the case. That caries over into the concept of not overcrowding and leaving areas with free space in them when you do graphics design. If the design looks too busy it looks like garbage. Give it some free space and it looks tons better. When we are designing an interface, we really are involved in a form of graphics design.

>>I am looking at ... controls having the same background color as the form.

I noticed, and you have some real nice examples of how to pull it off.

>>There is the "transparency" feature that...

That would be pretty trippy.

>>Whatever happened to VR and the "virtual cube"!:-)

lol, I think a virtual cube might apply to a 3D universe... but... there is such a thing as overkill in my opinion you can easily make the interface too fancy, and then the cool features you add just get in the users way. Some of the stuff they were demoing for longhorn looked real cool, but if I had to deal with it on a daily basis, it would get old real quick.

>>Nothing beats a clean VFP app. I have seen non-VFP GUI's that looked pretty - but we all know - once the game gets to the data - none of those guys can keep up. Spinning logo or flaming logo?:-)

Agree 1000%

>>ABout those background affects. When systems were slow, I refrained - it seemed that screens with a lot of "graphics" would struggle to resize.

That may explain why I've only just started to play with this. :)

>>I am wondering if type of image file affects performance after the app is loaded. Like a bmp is big - so does that mean it slows performance more than a jpeg? (etc)

Once in memory I’m pretty sure a jpeg and a bmp the same size take up about the same ammount of space. The loading time is a bit different, but is too full of trade offs for me to guess which is faster. (Disk speed vs. decompression time)

I think the bigger factor would be the rendered size of the image as opposed to the stored size. If you take a real large image and show it in a tiny space there is a lot of memory wasted storing the extra info. So unless I need to resize an image I always make it the same size that I want to display it at. I haven't worried too much about what format they are. I choose the format based on what I need to do with the image.