Several customers have recently asked about the change to the Dress Shop 8 screen layout or user interface. It's different and sometimes differences are annoying, when the familiar and comfortable changes and you did not know why. In this case, there were necessary reasons for the changes. We really don't like to make screen layout changes just to keep busy. We do prefer to work on patterns instead. But, this one had to be done.

The most apparent changes to the Dress Shop user interface were:

1. The pattern menu was replaced with saved pattern files, loaded using File - Load Pattern, rather than the in-product pattern menu. That was done because the in-product menu got to be too big and complicated, with each pattern having to be initialized individually within the Dress Shop program code. The code for that just got huge and Dress Shop ran slower with every new update. So, we moved the pattern building code into a separate utility and saved the results as saved pattern files. The menus went away and we now let Windows keeps track of the folders and file names and such. The code is smaller and faster and new patterns can be added to it without any limitations.

2. We added some new tools. And, there are others that are in work and coming in the future. The column of buttons at the left side of the screen got to be too tall for some customer's displays. There was no room for more buttons.

Largely because of these limitations, there have been no signficant additions to the Dress Shop tools or pattern list for several years. Last year's modest "Winter Collection" just about broke the product totally when it over-stressed the already over-loaded menus. That collection sealed the fate of that prior Dress Shop user interface. It could not be added to further.

With the change done for Dress Shop 8, the shackles were broken. We can now add more tools or patterns without breaking or over-stressing anything. There can now be new additions to the Dress Shop product line, but they will only work with the new Dress Shop 8 product. The prior menu and pattern initialization system cannot have anything further added to it without breaking down. Future Dress Shop patterns, collections, and tools cannot be provided to any of the older versions of Dress Shop.