These days we celebrated the third birthday of the pidoco project. For a short presentation, I searched my harddisk for old screenshots, pictures, designs, etc. It was a lot of fun to see how our Tool matured over time. The first lines of code were written three years ago.
I would call this my masterpiece of graphical design. 😉 Well, in first place, I wanted to explore the possibilities of SVG. Therefore, I added the very nice gradients, ignoring which color exactly I used. The whole app was written in SVG, even the slider and combo box, which you may see on the top right. The red and green arrows were our toolbar icons, which even had a fisheye effect! (I still don’t know, why we remove that gimmick…) I even found an old version of the sources which I was able to deploy on our test machine to play around. The next major version was the introduction of the ExtJS library, which made pidoco look like this (December 2007):
With this step, the application made it form a prototype to a real app that was, to some extent, usable. Our very first beta testers use pidoco with this look. To be honest, we should have paid them for the pain they had using pidoco… But we learned a lot and further improved both the interaction design and the graphics design. Here you can see an intermediate draft, which looks quite similar to the current version (compare: https://pidoco.com/preview):
