straw-man 3.2 default preferences

Doug Way dway at riskmetrics.com
Fri Apr 19 05:05:02 UTC 2002


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).


One way to mitigate the color overload somewhat would be to change the 
window pane background colors back to white, so that only the borders 
are colored.  This would be easy to do in time for 3.2, whereas 
something more drastic such as a little colored icon/area may require 
more thought (and may not reach agreement in time ;) ).  The white 
background could actually be a preference, turned on by default.  (Maybe 
I'll take a quick hack at this.)

On another note, I did notice one oddity in Scott's list after trying 
out the preferences.  collapseWindowsInPlace is turned on, which I don't 
think has been the case for images up 'til now.  This is probably only 
favored by Mac users (and only pre-OSX Mac), since that's the only 
platform which has similar behavior, I think.  So we may want to turn 
that off, I don't know.

I also agree that having optionalButtons turned on is a useful thing for 
newcomers.

- Doug Way
   dway at riskmetrics.com




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