Awasu Case Study

There was no doubt we needed a third-party GUI toolkit. The standard Windows controls are nowhere near enough to produce a quality program.
We trialed several toolkits and while they all offered a decent set of controls, we found that BCGControlBar was the easiest to work with and most reliable. Bugs were relatively infrequent and even when we encountered them, it was usually straight-forward figuring out what was wrong. With the other toolkits, we often found random and bizarre behavior that was impossible to track down because it often was caused by a convoluted sequence of Windows messages flying around the system.

The company

Awasu Pty. Ltd. produces a powerful RSS/Atom feed reader. Rather than just produce something that lets you read a handful of blogs, our focus is on building a powerful tool to let you not only monitor the information as it comes in but to also analyze and respond to it.

The challenge

A decent UI is a critical part of a successful application. We have spent thousands of man-hours building powerful features into our software and it would be tragic for it to go to waste because people were put off by anything less than a first-rate UI to match it.

The solution

We want to focus on building features, not eye candy. That's why we pay money to BCGSoft for their toolkit. We want something that provides the controls, the look and feel, everything that the user expects from a modern Windows application and just as importantly, we want it to work. The last thing we want to do is waste time tracking down and fixing bugs in somebody else's code, taking our attention away from our core task of building features.

The result

Right now we make extensive use of the visual styles, docking and auto-hide controlbars, date/time and color pickers, Tasks Pane and application bar.
For our next release, we will be making use of the new grid and planner controls in 8.0

AWASU screenshots

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