January 26th, 2017 by Adam Sandman
As we close out our focus on Rapise this month, we thought it would fun to take a look at how the UI used to look when it was first released in 2010, as well as look at how we've adjusted the UI to include new features while keeping the application simple to navigate.
Rapise 1.8 - Circa 2010
When we first released Rapise in 2010 we used an Infragistics theme based on Microsoft Office 2007:
The design was a little heavy, but the strong contrasts made it easy to see the important objects, such as tabs. However, as Windows 7 and Office 2010 were released, it started to look a little dated, and the graduated textures didn't render as well in the then-new Windows Aero interface.
Rapise 2.0 - Circa 2014
With the launch of Rapise 2.0, we streamlined the UI to use the newer Infragistics 2010 libraries that look like Office 2010. The new UI was much lighter and cleaner than the previous version:
This new version removed the gradients and heavy contrasts, which made it work better with the new Windows "flat" metro interface. The general feedback was that the UI was easier to look at, but the lack of contrast made certain items (e.g. tabs) harder to see because they blended in too much.
Rapise 5.0 - Present Day (2017)
As part of the recent release of Rapise 5.0, we overhauled the UI again, to change the ribbon to include the most frequently used options, added a new Options ribbon to better group the various settings that a user can change, and added a new color theme that matched Inflectra's branding and added better contrast between UI elements:
So hopefully you like the updated UI, but let us know in the Comments section if you have any feedback, ideas, rants or other thoughts about the evolution...
Thank you for being out fan!