User Interfaces can be a pain to work on. I am working on one at the moment for an administrative console. What I am finding is that the application needs about three levels of tab controls for the application to work. And this is rather confusing to the user. And you know what the problem is? This is the best way of organizing the information.

Some information needs to be drilled down to, and that makes sense. And sometimes drilling down via a tab control makes sense, but three levels does not really seem to work. That could be put down to not having different colours for various parts of the screen to differentiate tab from tab, but… It would be different if everyone used 1600 x 1050 pixel screens, but 1024 x 768 seem to be really prevalent, particularly in Remote Desktop and Citrix environments where increased screen resolution causes issues with performance – often doubling the latency on slow connections.

So until everyone gets 20″ laptop screens I guess I need to keep with the TAB control, and try to just set things out in a logical manner. And although I am working on the Administrator console for an application, I am not working on the details of how it works when you press a button – just the front end. Someone else can do the back end stuff.

And for those who have not heard, Sony has released the price for the PlayStation III. It is going to sell for only US$600! The Reason is that Sony want to use it as a showcase for some new technologies, and this will keep the price up!