As mentioned in some of our previous blog posts, we are already working hard on Royal TS for Windows Version 3 and Royal TSX for OS X Version 2, A beta version will be ready for you to test very soon. It’s still a lot of work ahead of us but we wanted to show some stuff we are working on very early to give you a chance to provide feedback and share your thoughts.

This post is about some UI changes we are working on V3 right now which will hopefully all make it into the released version.

Modern Metro Awesome Flat Special Simple User Interface Design Guidelines, or whatever…

Really?! How could Microsoft mess this up? You may call it whatever you want (flat, modern or Metro like UI) but Microsoft’s direction is clearly towards more simplistic design. While I personally had a hard time to get used to the new look and feel of Outlook 2013, compared to Outlook 2010, it grew on me over time. You can already switch to an Office 2013 inspired skin in Royal TS V2 but we are putting a lot of effort into the icons, the dialogs and in general the look and feel to make it consistent all the way. Here’s a very first teaser of how this looks like:

Wizards and Dialogs

We also invested in our wizard and dialog framework. Instead of displaying a tree to switch between configuration pages, we implemented a different navigation widget, very similar to what you find in Outlook or in Royal TSX on OS X:

A couple of things to point out here:

• The Display Name field allows you to configure the item color (for the tree or tab) and a custom Icon. We now support custom icons on all objects, even Credentials or Tasks!
• All the Password fields provide a quick and easy way to reveal/hide the password or copy it to the clipboard.
• Wizard and property dialogs can now be resized and maximized. Especially useful when you want to make use of the Notes feature each item allows you to store with.
• Notice the Skins button at the top: don’t worry, this is only there during development and allows us to look at each form and page using different skins. We want to make sure, all the UI looks great, regardless the skin you have chosen.
• High DPI display ready. We go the extra mile and look at each form and page to make sure it looks and works great on high DPI displays.

Better Shell Integration

In Version 3 we are providing a way to switch directly between tabs using Aero Peek through the taskbar:

Better Tab Integration

In Version 2 you could right-click a tab (or use the Change drop-down) to move an embedded session to an external window. While you still can do this, we took this to the next level for Version 3:

Now you can just drag the tab outside and create a new hosting window for the tab. You can then drag other tabs into the same hosting window and create a tab group in an external window. You can still split tabs into groups (horizontally and vertically) and drag those tabs again onto the main tab group of the main window.

That’s it for now. I know it’s not much but we will get into more details in the upcoming weeks (hence the Part 1 in the blog post title). Stay tuned and enjoy your Easter holidays…