[squeak-dev] Facelifting the second

Alexander Lazarević laza at blobworks.com
Thu Mar 25 07:58:45 UTC 2010


On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 21:17, Michael Davies
<mykdavies+squeak at gmail.com<mykdavies%2Bsqueak at gmail.com>
> wrote:

> That was a (very helpful imo) change made in the trunk to help distinguish
> between the active window and others, so not an artefact of your changes. An
> alternative approach could be to keep them visible but desaturate them for
> the non-front windows.
>

Before the menu and the full expand/contract button were just
locked/disabled for non active windows. Visually the buttons didn't change,
so there was no way of telling if they were active or not. They just did
behave differently than the close or collapse button. All in all I thought
this was very confusing. For example clicking on the menu button of an
inactive window just activated that window and you had to click again to
actually get the window menu in contrast on clicking on the close button,
which had an immediate effect on inactive windows.

Why it was chosen to deactivate the menu and full expand/contract buttons on
inactive windows is beyond me and might be worth for reconsideration.


> There's lots of really nice stuff in this changeset, and I really like it.
>

That's for sure! Nice and clean.

In addition what others already said just some minor things that crossed my
mind (again about the window buttons :)

If we are going to change the grouping of the buttons I rather would prefer
to have the menu button left from window title and then following to the
right collapse, full expand, close. The menu button behaves differently then
the other immediate action buttons and so might be better separated from
them.

+ and - as iconic symbols imply an inverse operation (for me), but they
don't behave like that. Maybe a small box and a large box would work better
for full expand/contract, also because clicking on + to contract a window
feels strange.

Even if there is some prominent operating system doing so, I'm not a big fan
of traffic light colors for window buttons. It's just distracting and the
color coding won't work for me. And i think the contrast of the yellow
button is to low.

Maybe it is fair to say, that I usually use the gnome desktop and so surely
my perception is affected by that. :)

Tim, these are just little subjective things and your contribution is a
major step forward.

Alex
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