> On 2020-02-17, at 1:47 PM, Stéphane Rollandin <lecteur at zogotounga.net> wrote:
> 
>> Maybe the gray level obtained by dithering is a little bit too fancy ;)
> 
> That's how decadence begins...
I'm all for a bit of decadence in general. Good chocolate. Beautiful furniture. Exquisite tools.

A looong time ago when the very first Apple colour UIs came out they were softly grey with just the Apple logo at the top-right having any bright colouring. That's actually be pretty decent colour scheme for typical applications. Yes, there are definitely places where all the colour is needed - art and image processing and design work amongst them - but it's hard to really justify psychedelia for a word processor.

And yes, Nicholas is quite right to point out the old ST-80 black and white UI; it is after what I cut my Smalltalk teeth on in the very early 1980's. You get attached to these things in much the same way as we all tend to think of any music dating from after our late teens a 'modern trash jangle'. Excluding, of course, SteamPunk magnificence like Abney Park.

Now, Tobias claims that icons in menus help navigating but I rather suspect that in fact it is the positional memory that really assists. Simply turning off menu icons may cause momentary confusion but I think that would rapidly be replaced by direct positional recollection. This, by the way, is one of the reason MS's attempt at menus that update and change layout based on recent usage is not so pleasant.

Generally we would not want hugely long menus but my experience in RISC OS suggests that one can effectively deal with a quite large number of menu choices IF the menu is broken into a sensible tree; it seems that the positional memory thing works even hierarchically.

We've got past some hilariously tacky skeuomorphism in UI design (in the wider world, not Squeak) and are currently into a bit of a swing too far into the "don't give the user a damn clue what is a button or other thing" paradigm. Maybe we'll settle down some day.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Compatible: Gracefully accepts erroneous data from any source.