On 11 Aug 2007, at 07:24, Yen-Ju Chen wrote: > One thing I don't like is over-using translucent.
Totally agree. Nothing should be translucent unless it gives some user experience benefit. The benefit for busy windows is that you see that they are busy without waving the mouse at them. The benefit for something like AZSwitch is that it doesn't obscure the windows. The benefit for much of the stuff Apple and Microsoft use it for is that it lets people say 'oooo, shiny.' > So this is what people mentioned here and there and what I can > image: > 1. Menu bar: no translucent. > The screenshot of Leopard's menu bar is pretty bad. > Black menu text and icon with translucent menu bar don't mix > well > with dark desktop background. Totally agree. What is every behind the menu bar that you want to see? I've not used Leopard, so there might be some really good reason behind this, but I suspect LSD. > 2. Dock (Tabbed shelf in future): background translucent, > foreground opaque. > This requires GNUstep to support 32-bit window. I had a thought about this. The compositing manager could (in theory) do one of two things: 1) Set an alpha mask for a window. 2) Composite a load of hidden windows to produce a certain appearance . Given the fact Fred seems to be working on RGBA support, this probably isn't worth doing, however. > 3. Active (focused) window: opaque. Definitely. > 4. Inactive (unfocused) window: 90% opaque. I don't like this. We have smaller shadows to give a visual clue that these windows are not active. Making them translucent makes it harder to read things from them. I wouldn't mind making their title bars translucent (for example), but not something that contains information a user might want to see. > How about floating panel of active application ? Floating panels are things I look at and click on, so I think they should be opaque. > 5. Busy window: 60% (?) opaque. I have this set at 40% for now (it's easy to tweak). Have a play with it and see what value you like (change opacity in Busy.m and recompile. Eventually I'll get around to putting it in a user default). I think my current value is too low; I picked it after a few tries so when I was debugging it was obvious that it was working. For real use we probably want a more subtle visual clue, rather than a blatant in-your-face thing. > I personally don't like translucent window title bar as Window > Vista. > It looks messy. I like the idea for non-active windows, but I'd have to see it in action. David _______________________________________________ Etoile-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-discuss
