Windchill gets a major facelift in Windchill 10.0. The most immediately noticeable improvement is the more modern, clean, and crisp color scheme and redesigned icons. Windchill 10.0 uses a fancy, sophisticated, and dynamic widget set. The next most noticeable thing is the Navigator component. You, the users, have told us that you very seldom use the navigation links. So, we got them out of the way. Navigation and Search are now performed in the Navigator. This will make the search results always available. Next are the table improvements. Tables are a major data presentation component in Windchill and we have significantly improved their usability and functionality. Here are but a few of the improvements: - Tables never overflow the page. That is, if a table has more columns than can fit in the browser page, you will use, not the browser’s scrollbar, but the table’s horizontal scrollbar to see those columns.
- The Table View dropdown is always in View.
- Create Views more dynamically by hiding, resizing, and shifting columns then hitting “Save View”
- Scrolling rather than Paging. Scrolling is more natural for users. After all, that’s how Microsoft Excel works. We have made significant performance improvements to make scrolling possible. (But note that because of physical limitations on client machines, we cannot throw an infinite amount of data at them. Therefore, we will resort to paging after a few thousands rows of data.)
- Search in table helps users quickly find data in large tables. This allows you to display only those rows that match the criteria that you type in the filter box.
- Tables will size themselves to the available space. That is, tables will grow and shrink (to display more or less rows) to fit the vertical space available on the page.
Other improvements include: - Breadcrumbs: These will orient users as to where they are in the application and allow them to quickly get back to where they came from.
- Header and Footer: To declutter the UI, the page footer was removed and all the header links have been consolidated under the “Quick Links” menu.
- To make it clearer for the user and the system what to search on, a Search Type drop down is added to the header.
- And speaking of search, the search UI also got a significant facelift. The Search UI is significantly streamlined, modernized, and configurable to users’ preferences.
- Windchill 10.0 provides a “Search History and Saved Searches” page. This page will show a list of the recently executed searches and the list of the user’s Saved Searches.
. . . and the list can go on, and on, and on! |
