I’ve been gradually working on the CSH Drink widget for some time now. Well, last night, I decided that I hated – hated – the old widget’s UI. Here’s why.
- Overkill. All the widget had to do was display a name and price for each drink.
- Size. The freakin’ thing was huge!
- Feel. It didn’t feel like a Dashboard widget. It felt more like a Mac app that got squeezed into a widget (which, while it works, wasn’t very good).
- Look. I’m not a UI designer, although I try to be sometimes. I failed.
With that in mind, I redesigned the widget. It’d have a smaller footprint in terms of pixels. It’d tell you what you needed to know, and that’s it. It’d be less ugly (although I’m still working on de-uglying it). And, it’d feel like a widget.
I doubt I actually accomplished much of my goals, but hey, it’s not a pro thing. It’s for geeks by a geek. And it gets the damn job done. With that in mind, here’s a screenshot of the new Drink Dashboard widget it action.
As you can see, it’s drastically smaller than the original – in fact, it takes up 45% of the original widget. The buttons are smaller. The whole thing fits much better into Dashboard than the other one did. And I don’t hate it.
To make it less ugly, I’m going to putz around with the shadows some more, as well as add a darkening gradient to the blue area. I’m mostly concerned with functionality at this point, as most of the design/implementation work on this has happened in the last 48 hours.