In the previous chapter, we explored the history of graphical user interfaces, looking at how they evolved and why they can provide a better user experience than contemporary alternatives. Unfortunately, despite all the benefits of graphical applications for end users, they can pose many challenges to the team designing and building them. In this chapter, we look at the sorts of issues that a team may face at various stages of creating an average-complexity graphical application.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Choosing a look and feel to match the operating system or product brand
• Different approaches to application layout and multiple windows
• The challenges of concurrency and cloud service integration
• Overheads introduced when developing a graphical application for multiple platforms