Have you ever experienced difficulties with hitting a button on a touch screen because of the button’s small size? Haven’t you wished texts were larger so you don’t need to zoom-in to read?

No more troubles - our new MetroTouch skin for Telerik’s ASP.NET AJAX controls is coming on board with Q2 2012, expected in about a week!

 

 

The Dimensions

Fingertip - 11mm - 32px

Dimensions are the biggest difference introduced in the MetroTouch skin. Almost every UI element has its regions and boundaries adjusted to a touch-friendly size of around 11mm at 72dpi per clickable area.

Mean percentage of erroneous trials for each...

We are thrilled about this week’s addition of Chris Sells to the Telerik team.  If you haven’t already heard, Chris, a world-renowned industry veteran, has joined Telerik as Vice President of the Developer Tools division.   

His division will be responsible for a number of UI control sets – including WinForms, WPF, Silverlight and ASP.NET – as well as a number of tools – including the Just line, OpenAccess ORM, and Telerik Reporting.  They will be ensuring developers are making the most of existing platforms while staying well-equipped for the future. 

Chris’ thoughts about his new role can be read on his...

We have taken quite an adventure in chronicling the new Silverlight CRM demo and all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into making new demos for our site, but now we finally get to talk about the really fun stuff – UI. I know, I know, depending on what hat you are wearing at your company you may be thinking “Hey, I loved the previous posts on MEF (here and here) as well as what you were saying about the Repository Pattern, what’s all this UI business?” As it turns out, Telerik sells a wide range of UI components that are used...

If you haven't heard, Odata is a Web protocol that exposes your data to the Web, allowing consumers to make queries through a set of URI parameters. RadGrid, Telerik's ASP.NET AJAX Grid control features a rich client-side API that enables you to easily bind to OData services and have all the paging, sorting and filtering done without ever posting the page to the server. That is all fine if your data is flat. Binding to hierarchical data, however, is another story. RadGrid officially supports hierarchical databinding on the server only. But let's go unofficial for a while. In this blog post we'll demonstrate an approach for detail table databinding...

In this episode we are diving into how we can construct a better user interface (UI) utilizing the tools that our User Experience (UX) experts have put before us.  If you recall last time we discussed the importance of UX and how it can help us to identify higher-traffic areas of our application as well as why certain views might need to be more prevalent within the application. Today we go one step further and translate UX into UI in terms we can all understand, including views, navigation, and everyone’s favorite click-count.

From Empathy to Navigation

One of the highlights from the last post...

Once again, I am excited to announce the start of a new initiative to improve the user experience with skinning the Telerik controls. We are starting work on a new Visual Style Builder application for the ASP.NET AJAX Controls and a major upgrade of the existing application for the WinForms Controls. The Visual Style Builder will allow easy, point-and-click customization of component skins, eliminating the need to get acquainted with the front-end structure of the controls. The Visual Style Builder will also speed up development of skins across several components - you will be able to define a style once and...

As a strong believer in sprites, I was inspired from a question that came up in a forum thread earlier this week, namely: how to use sprites in a RadTreeView? Well, I think it's rather limiting to write only about the RadTreeView, so this post discusses the technique for all of the navigational RadControls.

You can download the sample page and give it at try. Most of the code is quite straightforward - simply setting the CssClass property and a few layout adjustments. Please note, however, that this CSS is tightly bound to the skin that is currently used, so changing skins might not work...

It’s that time of the year again and we’re getting ready for the next quarterly release here at telerik. This time we have a major visual update coming for the ASP.NET product line. Almost all skins will get a refresh – some a minor QA to bring back to original designs, others a more thorough facelift. Wanted to get back to you even before the beta release next week with a sneak view of what’s coming so you can have your say. Here’s the major planned changes in skinning:

1. Black skin preserves its general look only gets a bit less….well,...

After digging around in Telerik's old Visual Source-Safe server, I found a long-forgotten prototype of a RadMenu skin.

I felt the urge to disclose it to you, and hope that you will like it.

On second thought, this initial draft looks good enough, so we might switch to hardware production. Don't be evil, we were first! Maybe we could even go 3G...

Ok now, getting serious - you could use this sort of menu for navigating when there is a large hierarchy in the site navigation (or, to be more specific, a hierarchy that has a wide tree). Currently, no...

It’s an interesting question that I got from a customer at a conference recently. He was wondering why we entered the Windows Forms space when we were a few years late compared to the other vendors and WPF was knocking on the door. 

There were a couple of reasons – we have a passion at Telerik to bring controls to Microsoft developers on whatever platform they are developing on. Also at the time we wanted to take the challenge to create desktop UI components where there was no market for WPF. WPF technology was changing from release to release which lead...