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The traditional approach for displaying application information to user is through Menu.

User select Help > About and we display a popup displaying the details.

Is there a better approach doing this?

If I want to place an About icon directly , will that be helpful? If so , what icon will be intutive? Will a small 'i' suffice?

Surely there should be a better approach. My GUI is on WPF .

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About is positioned in Help to save screen real estate and to keep the design clean, not overcrowded. Why do you think that user needs to know "About"? – Igor-G Jan 8 at 10:54
if the user is going to be technology Manager he would be interested to know about the version as well the major changes in the application version – Stefens Jan 8 at 11:07
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The Help > About place is generally accepted as where it should be. I don't tend to use it often, but when I do it's good to know it will be where most other applications keep theirs. Consistency is a good thing. – Kyle Sevenoaks Jan 8 at 11:49
As it's a common approach, the user will expect it there. What problem are you trying to solve by having it somewhere else? – Peter Jan 8 at 19:13

1 Answer

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Yes, it's a traditional location for detailed version information of an app.

You may also place version info (and licence information) at splash screen which is also widely used.

And sometimes, version could become a part of the app name (because of different reasons, like user should always reference a concrete version of the app because it has a lot of differences from previous versions, or to be able to install several versions of the app and quickly distinguish one version from another) and should be placed at every place app name is mentioned (i.e. desktop application shortcut or even window title, etc).

For example, Adobe Photoshop for Mac OS X has it's version number at splash screen as well as in an app shortcut:

adobe photoshop

Personally, I think it's ok to show version number at splash screen but you should use version in a file names with care.

Concerning contact details. I'm not sure you should include this info into an any part of your app (since your contacts may change), but put it on a site instead which could be accessed from the Help menu ("Visit developer site", "Contact developers", etc) or from an About screen (and not from a splash since it should disappear quickly).

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