Nayruden's /dev/random

For one of my classes today we came up with our “purpose statement” for our being at college. It’s quite enlightening to sit down and actually think about the reasons why you’re actually spending all this time and money when the only direct, physical result is a piece of paper. Here’s my philosophy:

Higher education primarily ensures that graduates have the tools and knowledge they need for the career field they want to go into. The time spent learning while earning the degree is invested into research in the field and honing professional and interpersonal skills. Studying at an academic institution is often necessary to make certain that topics are fully understood, that any questions are answers, and that the new knowledge can be easily referenced if needed in the future.

Attending a higher learning facility and living in school’s dormitory has extra added benefits. Living with other people that you don’t initially know helps immensely in helping students learn to empathize with those around them as well as help the students realize what kind of person they are versus what kind of person they’d like to be. This social experience is every bit just as important as the traditional academic learning that the school provides and needs to be treated as such when students are considering college options.

Designing the GUI for NetTunnel put my creativity to the test. I’ve never actually designed a GUI before, but I’ve seen and read a lot about GUI design theory, but theory seems to be fairly pointless for this design process. It was interesting for me to try to translate the idea in my head to the controls given in Visual Studios.

My first attempt ended up like this:

Main Window

Services Window

This is okay, but not great. Most of those elements are static elements that don’t move even if you resize it. It’s certainly not something I’d feel comfortable working with every day. After getting lots and lots of advice from friends, my second and final GUI design ended up like so:

Main Window

Services Window

A much cleaner and easier to understand layout. Services can be toggled just by clicking on the ‘service’ menu and then clicking on the appropriate service from the drop-down, or they can be toggled within the service window proper. All the most commonly used items in the gui are put in obvious places, while making sure that everything’s just a few clicks away. Everything resizes and can have the size proportions for it changed.

Now that I know how easy it is to create GUIs, I think I might start using them in future projects while retaining a command line version for power users.