>http://www.kartoo.com/
This was really interesting. It was fast too. I am working with content delivery in a specific market. There are some "breakaway" shops that are "moving" their content packaging from HTML to "flash". That link explains why. It has a very definate Star Trek TNG appearance

>looks like I'm going to have to break down and buy an Icon editor.
I paid for Snagit - but I do have "IconEdit32" and I think he was free.

But I have been studying the Ad-Aware "button" presentation as well as the form background. The form's background "graphics" will show through a textbox providing it has a "transparent" background and a "plain" style. When it has focus, however, the textbox background will be opaque. I could live with that.

The Adaware button effect seems like it would require at least two images objects - one "colorfull" and the other "blurred" - overlayed. Mousemove would determine which image to show. It could be done with Icons, or it could be done with transparent gifs.

And the image-object-buttons could reside on a transparent dockable "container" so that regardless of position, the form background will "shine" through (except for the opaque piece of the image).

It is going to take some careful planning and teasing to get the proper balance for a "business" interface. But at least I have something "new" to occupy my time!

>
>>stateless" data GUI paradigm
I've opted more for incremental search type combos for most of my lookups. For account lookups I use a separate database with multiple descriptive names for the account, auto generated on edit, but also editable later. That way if you have Sally Smith at XYZ Corp you can type Sally or XYZ and still wind up in the same place. Or if everyone just calls em those Bozos, you can add that too. In this case I do use Find and New buttons on my control, but I have been toying with the idea of having enter jump into a find if the user types info that doesn't match a record, the find then would lead into a new if no matches were found. I was going to play some more with that one of these days.


There is an "exact" off appraoch that will stack prospects that match the left n digits of the search string.

My "magnificent" search and navigator schemes, though, are sometimes deemed "unecessary" by expert staff users because they pretty much know the "accounts" they will be working with. Their preference is to just enter the account "identifier", press enter and then accomodate line item associations.

Some projects will have a list or a treeview navigation aid. I have noticed that some interfaces (like IE and NS and Eudora) have an X close button that closes the navigator panel.

This discussion is making little accumulative changes in my design aspirations. I thought I was settled down stale - but for some reason - the ideas are cooking and I am looking forward to the changes I will need to make to my library. Now - if we only had OCX classes with a transparent background!