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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Keramik for KDE 3.1
From:       "Eugenia Loli-Queru" <eloli () hotmail ! com>
Date:       2002-07-18 1:00:06
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Hello,
thank you for your reply.

>The titlebar buttons in Keramik are actually larger than the
>buttons you see in the KDE 3.0 default style, being 17x17
>pixels compared to 14x14.

WindowsXP has them as 25x25 these days, but I think they should be around 
20x20 or 22x22 at most, so they will be ok for people with accessibility 
problems. I understand what you are saying about the illusion coming from 
the shadow, but because KDE wants to use Keramik as the default theme, this 
brings in some requirements: it should be accessible by all users. A lot of 
people will try to target the buttons with the mouse and be a bit unhappy 
because they might not be very good... bowers, and they would not realize 
that the buttons are a bit bigger than they appear to be.

>We could make them larger still, but not without some
>difficulty because we unfortunately no longer have the
>source images the buttons were created from.

Nice backup plan for the *default* KDE 3.1 theme.. I am sorry, I do not mean 
to be sarcastic, you look like a very nice person, but if these images are 
not available at all, they should be re-done as fast as possible and held in 
the KDE CVS or somewhere where backups are made every so often. What other 
source images of Keramik we do not have available? Is the whole theme's 
images missing, or only some pieces of it? How easily these pieces can be 
redone, and what time frame are we talking about?

It would be very amateurish and unresponsible to ship KDE 3.1 with defaults 
that we do not have a real backup for. Again, I am not trying to be a pain 
over here, but I like sleeping at night knowing that things are going as 
they should suppose to go.

With great success, great responsibilities emerge. KDE is now the No 1 unix 
desktop environment, and we should be a bit more serious about what gets in 
and what goes out. That is my humble opinion at least, as both a user, 
developer, journalist, UI  designer and someone who wants to see a unix 
desktop that works better than the commercial solutions... :)

>Regarding point three, the window deco already has a
>grabbar at the bottom of the window, although it's difficult
>to make it out against the background on this screenshot.
>The color used for the grabbar is nearly identical to the
>color used for the window background in this color
>scheme.

How about creating something like the one I suggest in the screenshot 
(http://www.eugenia.co.uk/images/keramik.png)? A design like the suggested 
one will never have a problem, no matter the background. Again, we should 
think the people with accessibility problems, but not just them. A default 
theme should be well defined no matter the background color or other 
circumstances that may occur on one's desktop. Otherwise, it should not be 
the default theme, no matter how cool the most loud aspects of it may look 
like.

Gentlemen, we have almost 3 months until KDE 3.1 release. Let's make Keramik 
rock.
I mean business here and I am pretty serious about it (I know, I need to get 
a life  ;-).

>You're right about the window borders not having a
>consistant width across the sides of the window. The borders
>have a darker inner line that's supposed to separate the
>window contents from the window borders, but apparently
>it's too bright for dark color schemes resulting in that
>impression that the borders are wider than on the titlebar.
>I actually hadn't noticed that before, but I'm going to
>try to fix it by making those lines darker.

Again, the solution I suggest in the screenshot can solve both this problem 
and the non-visible grabbar problem..

>Doing it this way is
>a bit of a compromise because we felt that the window
>deco would lose some of its appeal if it had a black
>outline around the whole window.

The suggestion I made does not only have a black outline, it has 3 pixels: 
white, grey and black. This makes the window to be clearly defined in the 
desktop space. In fact, again, this will solve all the above problems we 
discussed. Shadows are good to have, outside of this well defined window, 
not part of the window.
A UI that is not clear enough, it will suffer from user's critisism over 
time.
On OSX, while they do keep all this eye candy in place, the borders are well 
defined, and there is enough contrast there, as the background window view 
is always white and they ship with a dark blue background color.

>Also thanks for CC'ing me, as I'm not subscribed to
>kde-usability. People have been hinting to me lately
>that I should take a look at this list though =).

I think you should... :-)
There was another bunch of emails the other day discussing other problems 
with Keramik as well. Please check the archives for replies on this topic as 
well (click on the numbers on the left, not on the topics):
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-usability&r=1&w=2

I am sorry for my long blah-blah... It is just that I take some things too 
serious sometimes... /me grabs a beer and goes outside to start having a 
life...

Best Regards,
Eugenia

               -----------------
    Editor-in-Chief at http://www.OSNews.com






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