Windows 8 and the Desktop requires more dynamic software

With all the emphasis on the Windows Store (aka. Metro) side of Windows 8, one may wonder what about the desktop ? Can the desktop be a viable platform for future touch enabled applications, especially for tablets ?

The answer is yes, but software must change in how it is designed for the desktop side of Windows 8. It is not enough to simply make software scalable or even touch ready. What is needed is dynamic, hybrid software, capable of dealing with a variety of devices, as well as a variety of versions of Windows.

How do I plan on doing this, you may ask ?

Smart software

I have for a long time been a strong supporter of backward compatibility. Software needs to be able to run on older computers, as well as newer ones. Software needs to be able to know not only what version of Windows it is running on and then adapt, but it also needs to be able to know what hardware it is running on, for example a desktop with a large display or a tablet with a smaller sized display and with touch and then also be able to adapt. This means the user interface must be dynamic and changable as the need requires. What works with a mouse and a large screen may not work with a tablet, touch and a smaller screen. What do you do if you connect a tablet to a larger external display ? Software needs to be dynamic. But with all the dependence upon complex drag and drop development tools, do developers know how to make their software dynamic ?

Hand coded, customized software

An interesting thing has happened with my customer base. While most prefer a drag and drop Visual Designer for development, some actually prefer to hand code their applications without any Designer at all. Hand coding is likely unheard of today for many programmers, especially those who are using todays studio development environments. Hand coding though is not only possible, it also can provide more opportunities for developing dynamic software like I mention above.

EZGUI 5.0 professional (see:  http://cwsof.com/ezgui5pro.html  ), the latest version of my EZGUI development tool, was designed specifically with the hand coder in mind with many features geared towards building more dynamic software. I also have plans to work on an update (version 5.1) to improve its functionality specifically on Windows 8 (ie. add touch specific features, etc.). While EZGUI has a Visual Designer, I find that customers who are hand coders are able to create more dynamic and unique software than those who depend upon the Visual Designer/Code Generator. My goal is to improve the designer experience so it provides a little more of the flexiblity that hand coders currently experience.

Dynamic Customization

One of the advantages of EZGUI is its customization features. For hand coders, one has more options for dynamically customizing user interfaces. For example, EZGUI has a strong ownerdraw engine for customizing controls. One can easily write code which dynamically changes controls based on current need. Hand coders also can write dynamic code for control creation, so a forms controls can change as needed for the circumstance. It is the customization features which I feel are one of EZGUI’s greatest strengths. EZGUI was designed so you can even customize the common dialogs, like the open file dialog, to change how they look and even function. It is this ability to dynamically customize applications which can make the biggest difference in developing desktop software which can change as needed depending upon the hardware it is run on.

Windows Store applications can only run on Windows 8. Imagine software which can change as needed when run on a tablet, but morphs into something different when run on a legacy Windows XP or Vista computer. Smart software, you might call it. Not only would this be a good idea, but it is quite doable.

EZGUI and customization

EZGUI was designed with customization in mind. Not only does it have an ownerdraw and customdraw engine for customizing controls, but how it handles coordinates for user interfaces also makes a big difference. EZGUI uses a unique character based scalable coordinate system, rather than pixels. Unlike Dialog Units which is built into the Windows Dialog API’s, EZGUI’s character units are floating point so they can accurately define exact positions and sizes to the pixel level. You can change the character unit size dynamically, which will scale all forms and controls created after. EZGUI can also link the creation of fonts to this character unit, rather than to the system DPI settings (small fonts, large fonts on older systems). Fonts are defined via an indexing system, so rather than a fixed font for each control, you can have a fixed font index, but you can dynamically create any font you want for that index, before the controls are created so you can change an entire applications fonts on the fly.

Especially when hand coding an application, one can actually have multiple code blocks for the creation of the forms controls, but use only a single set of event routines for all of them. For example, you could dynamically determine what kind of hardware your application is running on and then when a form is created, select a different control definition routine depending upon what is needed. The different control definition routines, could all use the exact same event routines, so you only change how the controls are created, their properties, colors, fonts and position, but use only one set of event code for different layouts. Because EZGUI is not object oriented, you don’t have to create objects and work with their own event routines. Controls are created using simple function/procedure calls which can be dynamically changed, but all the events are sent to a different set of routines, no matter how the control was created. As long as the control ID matches, it does not matter how the control was created, the event routine can process the events for a specific control based on its ID.

Customization also is important to define the look and feel of an application. For example maybe on Windows 8 you would like a more flat appearance, but on Windows 7 or earlier you would like a more themed look or even something custom. Using ownerdraw to customize controls dynamically allows you to do this. Maybe you don’t like the flat appearance of desktop apps on Windows 8 and want your app to look the same on all versions of Windows or at least similar. EZGUI’s customizing features makes this more possible, at least to make them more similar than would be otherwise.

Working with more universal features

One problem one has when designing software for the latest version of Windows is that some times one may use features which only exist on the latest version. This makes designing software which works similarly on multiple versions of Windows very difficult. EZGUI was designed to add special features, but still within the confines of what exists in multiple Windows platforms. For example, EZGUI has its own proprietary 2D Sprite engine which   works on nearly all versions of Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 8. No DirectX is used and no special hardware is required. Even EZGUI’s 3D Canvas control was designed to use a more universal OpenGL 2.0 specification, so that the majority of Windows computers will support it.  By using a GUI framework which was designed for a larger range of Windows platforms, one can build software designed for the majority of Windows PCs in use today. EZGUI even dynamically loads some operating system dynamic link libraries and tests for the existance of some API’s before using them so the runtime libraries run well on most versions of Windows, but can take advantage of features which possibly may only exist in later versions of Windows. Even the GUI framework itself is dynamic.

Dynamic, Smart software is possible

So software developers should be able to create such dynamic, smart software so it runs well on a variety of devices (x86) from tablets, netbooks to full blown desktops. This how I designed EZGUI to work, to be dynamic, customizable.