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I had put together an imaginary Winrar interface back a while and thought I'd share it with you to hear your thoughts about it. I'm using Winrar daily for years to send and receieve stuff over email, and while I don't have any particular problems, its interface is generally old and outdated. Maybe a refresh would encourage people to actually buy the thing and get rid of the nags :)

ps. sorry for my shoddy photoshop skills, I'm still not very good at that.

I'm aware that my mockup doesn't include all the features that are in winrar, this is more like a basic version for people who don't use anything more, like me.

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This is the main window which users will see after opening an archive from explorer. It will show the contents on the left with a breadcrumb bar and a view choice. On the right is a list of locations that can be customized. Click on a location to extract all files to a new folder under that location. Or select files and drag&drop them to that location button. Once a location button is hovered, it shows the exact address to be used on a second line. (like in the first button in the mockup)

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Once you initiate an extraction, the window shrinks upwards and leaves you with the progress mode.

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Once the job is done, the winrar window starts counting down to close itself unless you click on something else. You can also open the folder you had extracted the files to.

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This is the archive mode. The left part is empty so you can drag and drop files to be compressed there. And on the right there is a couple of options to set for your archive and finally the button to start the job.

Edited by backdrifter
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https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/792854-winrar-ui-concept/
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Simplicity is the key here. You use it every day, most of us just right click on a rar file and unzip, not really worrying about the program or its looks. And yeah, that makes me look around to much for things, give me the tab at the top.

Now a ribbon interface....

  ccoltmanm said:
Simplicity is the key here. You use it every day, most of us just right click on a rar file and unzip, not really worrying about the program or its looks. And yeah, that makes me look around to much for things, give me the tab at the top.

Now a ribbon interface....

Powerarchiver has a ribbon. Oher than that Powerarchiver is quite crappy in my opinion. Nothing beats the speed and compression quality of WinRAR.

Good job! I have often felt the same way about not only Winrar but MOST of the extraction programs. I use mostly 7Zip and it sucks so bad. I finally found skins for it so it isn't bad. I really like what you've done here, nice colors and everything seems to click. Keep up the good work. Keep going - maybe the developer is WATCHING?

Thanks for the input guys, I got the message that it's too crowded as it is. And that's totally true if you're only doing drag and drop operations but the when you try to do anything through the dialogs, it's a bit disturbing. I remember trying to split up an archive to pieces and I had to spell the mb and kb words exactly right before it went right. (no slider, no drop down boxes no nothing) I just think it could be more intuitive...

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