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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Re: Ui enhancements
From:       Greg Day <gregday () ecsis ! net>
Date:       2003-01-26 9:59:58
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After playing around with the icon text shadow patches, I really like it.  
With certain thicker fonts, it looks more like a shadow and less like a dark 
pencil outline.  A few thoughts...

I think movements like this one, to consider icon text a part of the GUI 
instead of "just another bit of text" is a good thing.  That's why I use a 
larger, darker font for icons, menus, and button text, the clock, tasklist 
text, but prefer something like Arial for document text (Konqueror, KMail, 
KOrganizer entries...) I'm glad KDE gives me this fine grained font 
selection!  But I digress...   The point is that a lot of text like this 
indeed would be /very/ tiring on the human eyes, but not for something as 
infrequently looked at as icon text.

I've been looking at the way shadows are handled on different interfaces.  
There are a lot of shadows in WinXP (including icon text shadows) that angle 
down to the side, wheras nearly all the shadows on MacOSX are straight back 
and down.  After interacting with a GUI for a long time, the "shadows off to 
the side" tend to play tricks with your vision.  People have complained about 
this perspective annoyance with the shadows of the Crystal icon set as well, 
and I believe most people prefer "straight back and slightly down" shadows to 
more left or right offset ones.

Then we have the issue of "option bloat," which is already a problem in KDE.  
Should we have user-configurable shadow alpha level and shadow offset angle?  
I think putting that much detail for this into KControl would be bloated, but 
perhaps it can be left a "hidden" configurable value via the kdesktoprc file 
for those who want to change it.  I think it is worth putting a global option 
to have them at all somewhere in a kcmodule, and it would be a good idea to 
make this part of the list of eyecandy in KPersonalizer's list.  We do have 
to consider older and slower machines and a lot of people will probably hate 
the whole idea anyway :)

cheers,
greg

( this is starting to feel less relevant to kde-devel and more suited to the 
usability list )
 
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