straw-man 3.2 default preferences

Joshua 'Schwa' Gargus schwa at cc.gatech.edu
Fri Apr 19 14:03:39 UTC 2002


My experience has been the opposite of Jon's: right from the start, I
was enamored of Squeak's multicolored windows.  Rather than
"discordant", I would instead use the adjectives "gay" or "festive".
I don't think that Squeak's color scheme is ugly, only different.  It
would be a mistake for the Squeak community to hide its personality by
trading its gypsy garb for a three piece suit.

(Of course, I might be wrong about the collective personality of the
Squeak community, since Jon is clearly part of it, and yet he
disagrees with me.)

The colored windows also provide a visual cue about their function
("Where did I put that selector finder?  Oh, I see its blue corner
sticking out there").  When the windows were a solid color, one could
argue that the text was somewhat harder to read, but that is no longer
the case.

New users who can't deal with colors that are different from what they
are accustomed to will probably also not be able to deal with the
fundamentally different philosophy of computing embodied by Squeak.

In short, Keep the Colors!

Joshua


On Thu, Apr 18, 2002 at 11:16:22PM -0400, Jon Hylands wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Apr 2002 19:37:24 -0700, Scott Wallace
> <scott.wallace at squeakland.org> wrote:
> 
> > Would you also put these inboard scrollbars on the *right*, on 
> > similar grounds of familiarity?
> 
> Well, I certainly would (and do).
> 
> I think you should also seriously consider setting the windows to all
> white, or at least all the same (light pastel) color. For some people
> (myself included), seeing all those differently-colored windows is a total
> turn-off. In my mind, it takes away completely from the content of the
> windows, which is what is important. I think the color indicators for
> different kinds of windows needs to be a lot more subtle, and occupy a very
> small amount of screen real-estate (like maybe an icon/area in the title
> bar or something).
> 
> I know there are a lot of people on the list who disagree, but think about
> it this way -- how many applications have you downloaded that have
> discordant color schemes like that?
> 
> Yeah, Squeak needs to be different, but I think it acheives that in and of
> itself, not because it looks super flashy.
> 
> Anyways, just my two cents...
> 
> Later,
> Jon
> 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
>    Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon
> 
>   Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
>            http://www.huv.com



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