ZipGenius X Development Log – ep. 2

Did we say that ZipGenius X has a complex development process? Yes, we can confirm that once again.

You can understand how much complex an application is by opening its “Settings” or “Options” dialog. Developing a settings dialog is one of the hardest task in application development because it’s always conceived to be a part of the application that shouldn’t be used everyday, while it supersedes the whole application setup. Every setting mad through this dialog must be accessible from any other part of the application, so the first task to complete is to think which settings must be available to the app just after the setup.

ZipGenius X has lots of default settings that will make you use it well even if you don’t customize them; on the other side, if you will open the settings dialog, you will make your own ZipGenius set up.

In this screenshot you’re seeing a brief preview of what is coming up.

We’re innovating but we don’t want to mess up the experience of the old ZipGenius 6 options dialog. Better: we’re streamlining that experience because ZG6 had lots of settings too and their interface was really overwhelmed by options. We’ve selected which settings to keep in ZGX and which to remove, according to the current set of features designed, so the settings interface will be more cleaner and intuitive than before because we are using tabs for every major set of settings to show.

And we’re going further: if you look at the screenshot, we are improving the “User” settings page which was quite poor in ZG6. Basically, ZGX will retrieve your user full name and profile picture from the system (in Windows) but you can customize these details as you like; also, you can add optional details that will contribute to generate a vCard (a .vcf file) that you can force ZGX to add to any new archive you create and – if you want – you could export it to use it with other apps.

That’s all for now. See ya! 🙂