From: Philip A. <ph...@vc...> - 2002-07-24 19:36:21
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Vince Darley writes: > I've made quite a few cosmetic improvements to the overall interface, > and am going to upload a new version later today. if you have anhy > specific suggestions, send 'em along... Don't make buttons 30 pixels wide. I think the old default was 58 pixels but I've always found that slightly small in proportion to the 20 pixel height. One offshoot of this is that users have a larger area to click in. A simple consideration. I'll try to come up with a few more every once in a while. As a general comment though, I'd say to consider an application-wide style for control sizes and stick with that throughout. Meaning that all regular system font buttons (e.g.) would be say 20x64 pixels minimum and only wider if the QDTextBounds() width of the title was too large to fit comfortably in 64 pixels. Same thing for small control fonts. Which brings up the area of the text baseline alignment of controls in the same "row" and the left/right edge of "column" alignments and further, the notion of an implicit alignment grid in dialog boxes. If you have the ability to work with a development only background picture with grid lines at say every 1/8 of an inch, it can be a real help. Since its a well known fact that there is a very high percentage of visually oriented Macintosh users, it's good to massage that part of their awareness. This can apply to the dimensions of dialogs as well. Computer screens are mostly 4:3 and lately 3:2. Simple harmonic ratios. Always pleasing. >> Buttons in the status window are too large, and it seems to me, >> now that there are so many items in the mode popup, there should >> be categorized sub-menus. > It is hard to get small controls in aqua, but I agree those buttons > are too large! I think you'd be better off with small bevel buttons (or reasonable facsimile) in that portion. Set the control title to selected mode name after the choice. > Any suggestions for categorized sub-menus of modes? Could be a good > idea. Well, leave "Text" (the mode) and maybe a few others like Tcl as a single items but something like "Programming" could cover C/C++, Pascal, Fortran, and Ada. Similarly "Web Related" for CSS, HTML, PHP, etc. >> Endless loop situation. Had to force quit. > I have seen that with an older version, but not with this one -- again > I shall have to debug. Did it work when you tried a third time? There was no third chance. How's about I try again in a few months and give you another "first impression". IMO, there would be absolutely no problem convincing anyone of the awesome Tcl power available. The key competition areas are therefore stability and presentation. An AppleScript Studio application taking advantage of calls to 'do shell script' plus regular AppleScript can demonstrate that easily. Best wishes, Philip |