Interface Update

[martinkerz]

Mariner has updated their icons. Although it looks a bit too colorful for my eyes it is a nice gesture of spit and polish. I would love to see NW(P/E) to get a set of updated icons as well. Some of them really are too pale. Some stronger colors would be great… Some of them haven't changed since Okito Composer times.

[ptram]

I admit I would ask the opposite: less and less colorful icons. Less color means less distractions from text.

Paolo

[martinkerz]

I admit I would ask the opposite: less and less colorful icons. Less color means less distractions from text.

At least we can agree that an update of the icons is needed?!

[xiamenese]

I admit I would ask the opposite: less and less colorful icons. Less color means less distractions from text.

At least we can agree that an update of the icons is needed?!

On the other hand, for me, what has been the deal-breaker for me with Mariner Write — and Mariner Calc, which I used even more — is Carbon and a very un-OS-X UI. To me, updating to Cocoa and a more Mac-like UI would come long before colour changes to icons.

As for NWP, I'm with Paolo. I wouldn't want anything more colourful ... actually, I don't know why I haven't got the toolbar turned off anyway, as I almost always use the key-strokes.

Mark

[greenmorpher]

Ha! I'm for a bit of color! I don't find the color distracting because I see text as one thing and colored icons as another. I don;'t want what my wife calls a "folkloric" dispolay of every known crude, bright color, but I want enough color in the icons so I can distinguish among them at a glance. Not vast numbers of violent-to-the-eye colors, but just a bit.

The simplest case -- blue on bloody gray. Blue tabs. Blue Tooldrawer palette collection selection. Blue aligment selection... I don't know why psychologists have spent some much time on perception and information processing -- nobody takes a blind bit of notice of them (a bit like their work on education). And I don't know why I have bought a computer/monitor combination that shows me millions of color when I can't use them for speedy navigation. You want to be able to point and click quickly -- you need good differentiation and color differentiation is among the strongest ways to go. Having to stop and read labels -- now THERE's something that interferes with text production.

E.g. in the Tooldrawer -- put a bit of color in the top bar of each palette, so you can see at a glance where one palette ends and another begins. Make them a little bigger too -- maybe 50% bigger.

Get a bit more differentiation going -- e.g. in the Styles palette, the Paragraph Styles are blue and the Character styles Purple. Separate them more by color. Sure they have different symbols, but if the symbols are supposed to be the differentiator, why have different colors at all?

In the font menu -- I've put forward my views before. I would like a more colorful AND more functional display along the lines of FontCard. If you get color, you can link to it at a glance then search around it. Ion Idriess, the great Australian Light Horse sniper of World War I talked about how things that stood out a little would attract the eye -- asnd how his life was saved and an enemy sniper's life was lost through one little thing had become an anchor for the eye.

Psychological perception and information processing work has shown the truth of this stuff in more mundane situations.

Since the apparent demise of FontCard, what about an effort, Nisus, to produce a replacement for it which would substitute for font menus across both Cocoa and Carbon apps?

In the meantime, how about a more functional menu within Nisus Writer which allowed us to choose which of the Fontbook menus we viewed -- I would choose "Favourites" and "Recently Used" and nothing else -- and allowed us to apply some color to them or background color behind them so we could set up markers for our eyes to jump to.

"Allowed us to apply some color" -- that's the key. Some people don't want color; some people do. How about offering a choices or choices?

Best regards, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
Publisher, Editor, Business Writer
The Worsley Press

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[greenmorpher]

And in the interim (while the mighty new type menu is being worked out!) what about tweaking the existing type menu. The "medium" size is too small OR the "large" size is too big.

I need something a big larger than the medium for easy viewing or a bit smaller than the large -- which is too big to use comfortably with the Character Palette type menu because whil;e it lengthens, it doesn't expand sideways.

Anyway, the size jumps to large is too big.

Comparative sizes, see attached. This is at 90 ppi, so my actual viewing size.

Cheers, Geoff

Geoffrey Heard
The Ad Doctor Online

Win business with the recession-busting "How to make great ads for (sm)all business: 99 real world advertising ideas to kickstart *your* business today". See http://www.worsleypress.com

[MBP]

I pondered this the last days and I too wish it would be tweaked a bit. a positive update is always welcome. a touch of modest colors intthe right places and withing the various windows would also make things more user friendly in a psychological way too.

Don't comic strip it like KDE linux.