Ver 3 Weaker graphic design distracts

[Curtis Clifton]

On Jan 4, 2005, at 7:21 AM, Jeremy Reichman wrote:

> I agree with Robin. In comparison to OO2, OO3 betas so far (I'm on 
> beta 5)
> look very distracting. It does feel like the application is getting in 
> my
> way, whereas OO2 felt like it fit in.

Perhaps this is a matter of a difference in the tasks to which we apply 
OO, but I find that OO3 is visually _more_ helpful.  The highlights and 
borders help me track my place in the outline, especially when an item 
has many children.  I also have come to prefer the new checkboxes, 
which seem like part of the content instead of extraneous controls.  
The new handling of pop-up list columns is much nicer visually.  
Perhaps my eye is more distracted by the depth and size of the old 
widgets than by the hard edges of the new widgets.

With regard to column headings, you can edit the style of these to suit 
your taste.  And you can edit the default template so you never have to 
suffer through those "unprofessional and unfinished" bleeding pixels 
again.

> Robin explained my feelings quite well. The contrast of the selection
> outline and the outline widgets (checkboxes, etc.) do feel the most 
> out of
> place to me. Having the opportunity to mute them, or muting them by 
> default
> -- at least on-screen -- would be a bonus to me.

An option to change the color of the highlighting and borders would be 
welcomed.  This would be nice to have on a per-document basis.  Then if 
one wants to hide the borders, she or he could just set the color to 
match the background, or nearly so.  By being per-document, we could 
still use the more forceful borders for documents where they are 
useful.  And of course, by changing the templates we could have 
whatever default setting we would like.

Best,

Curt

----------------------------------
Curtis Clifton, PhD Candidate
Dept. of Computer Science, Iowa State University
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~cclifton