I’m wondering whether it’d be better presented for the less competent if it were a series of nested choices – first broad categories, then more specific as needed, with around a half dozen buttons to click on at any one time. Y’know… like that irritating simplified Control Panel you get in XP by default, until you switch it back to ‘classic view’.

One thing it has going for it, although this is an ass-pulled speculation of my own, is that people can probably reliably identify one from a small collection of pictures more reliably than they can click on the right (text labelled) button, or type the right thing.

Relies on coming up with simple to describe, and distinct, icons for each tool, and each category, and each sub-sub-category though.

Kim Johnsson wrote:

Also, as a point of curiosity, all the “links” open in Internet Explorer, which is certainly not my default browser. Is this by design?

Good news everyone. This got fixed in version 0.6. :) No more nasty IE stuff.

@ road:

I presume it would be doable with ActiveX but it is no longer possible to just run them. You have to get the user to install the control by clicking on that tiny yellow bar, that no one computer illiterate can ever see. No seriously, if I had a penny for every “user unable to download files or run ActiveX after upgrading to IE8 from IE6” ticket I would have like… A bag of pennies or something.

Also, I don’t even know if ActiveX can escalate to elevated mode on Vista/Win7 which would be required for bunch of these things.

Honestly I think that running it as a native (well, managed but whatever) app is just easier and less error prone. I mean, trying to mess with the client machine from the web just becomes all kinds of crazy since every browser has security features to prevent just that from happening. :)

It might be useful to have a bunch of different VMs running on your dev box (e.g., XP, Vista, Win7) so you can easily test on different OSes without leaving your chair or rebooting.

Also — this might be preposterous, but would it be possible to implement something like this as a web app? Probably not (probably a bad idea to let browser access OS functions) but as it stands, you still need to get your target users to *download* the thing…

Tino wrote:

nd isn’t it opposite to one of your original design goals? That you could hand this to someone and just say “click on the ping tool” instead of having him misspell ‘ping’ 30 times in the command line?

Yes, excellent point. It solves one problem and creates another.

Tino wrote:

However, be aware that you are essentially just re-inventing the ‘explorer’ mode in the Windows file browser, with 100 or so programs that does 1 thing.

Yeah, we are sort of going in circles now. I guess the answer here is not to go overboard with the features. Keep things simple and minimalistic.

Kim Johnsson wrote:

it just fails with the message “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” (is that a fancy way of saying “Null pointer exception”?

Yes, I think it is a null pointer exception. I’m just not sure where. I think I have an idea though…

Kim Johnsson wrote:

Also, as a point of curiosity, all the “links” open in Internet Explorer, which is certainly not my default browser. Is this by design?

Yes, at least initially it was. IE is the only browser which will allow you to “Run” the downloaded app from a temp directory, which is exactly what I wanted for stuff like Sysinternals tools. Download to a temp directory and ask user if they want to run it.

I should probably do it the right way and make SA download the executable by itself, but using IE was a quick and easy hack. I think that the links on the Misc tab should open in the default browser though.

Quick System Info does not work on my 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate, it just fails with the message “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” (is that a fancy way of saying “Null pointer exception”? :P)

Also, as a point of curiosity, all the “links” open in Internet Explorer, which is certainly not my default browser. Is this by design?

Isn’t your search-based tool mostly just re-inventing the unix command line :). And isn’t it opposite to one of your original design goals? That you could hand this to someone and just say “click on the ping tool” instead of having him misspell ‘ping’ 30 times in the command line?

Since you ask for how to minimize complexity; you could consider a tree-based multi-page dialog. Like the preference dialog in eclipse ( http://www.google.com/images?q=eclipse+preference+dialog ). It is an ok way to hide the complexity of providing 100 functions, since you can organize them in categories and sub-categories, etc., keeping the visual complexity in any one state low. However, be aware that you are essentially just re-inventing the ‘explorer’ mode in the Windows file browser, with 100 or so programs that does 1 thing.

The tabbed interface is lovely, now it fits on the 1024×768 screens we still have on our laptops. Thanks for sharing!