Making History

Making Xslimmer's history functionality took a little bit more than what was initially scheduled. The basic reason was that new ideas kept coming while we were designing its window. From these new ideas, we implemented the possibility to restore a backed up application and the possibility to report issues with applications slimmed.

Additionally, we took a while to design the window. In its initial conception, the history window had only text, and too much information. Little by little we transformed it into something like this:



While this image was pretty close to the final version of the window, there were still many little details to take care of. First, the color buttons. These did not look completely right to the eye. In addition, they did not behave too well while one of the apps was selected. Second, the sorting buttons in the segmented button were not showing correctly. Third, I had made it so that when an application was restoring, its restore button would show a spin progress indicator, so the window did not really need one. Finally, the window was in need of some gradient.

As a result, we kept working, and the window was almost ready a few days later:



Still solving the segmented buttons bug in Cocoa was going to take quite some code. Louie commented: "I know how to solve that bug: get rid of the buttons, and make the table headers the sort buttons". That is what finally went into 1.1.4:



So, tell us what you think!