Opacity of resource boxes

[Marco Martin]

On Thursday 01 March 2012, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> Hi all,
> though I generally really admire Marco's design skills, there is one design
> decision which I'm not totally happy about: The opacity of the resource
> boxes. I don't think it's a bad idea in general to bring more opacity to
> the UI, but the current high opacity of the resource boxes makes them a
> bit too heavy for me. Especially when I have one or more rather big
> resource boxes on an Activity, the whole screen is just dominated by grey.
> Plus, the background image is barely visible anymore.
> So I personally would prefer to have the resoruce boxes a lot more
> transparent. Everything else can stay the way it is, but an activity screen
> covered mostly by grey rectangles doesn't look all that nice to me.
> So what do the others think about this?

for me was a decision only in part rational, i've grown a bit tired of the 
look of air, and the subsequent problems of text readability and visual noise, 
i think that glass effects are a bit dated as visual concept.
is kinda expected and mandatory, in some years we'll look at those ui 
transparencies like we look at those 80's haircuts ;)

so i've tried this.

it's a bit of a stay sober at all costs concept, in part to contrast the other 
current designs (iphone with hyper realism, wp7 with a thousand of random 
colors at once on the screen), in part because that i never found an issue in 
completely covering the wallpaper, but this again is personal, i know people 
can get quite emotionally attached to their wallpapers :p

so yeah, if many people find issues in this (and yes, i know i tend to overdo 
things sometime), i can stated the experiment is failed for now and use the 
"translucent" variant that is still shipped in the theme for the resource 
boxes, their text has a thin white border so readability should resist a bit 
more. could look a bit out of tune tough.

but i'll shut up and step back for now, i'm curious to see opinions on this :)

Cheers,
Marco Martin