Release Mode

[David Jarvie]

On Saturday 17 November 2007 23:52:58 Eike Hein wrote:
> Andreas Hartmetz wrote:
> > Compare a typical KDE 3 style to a newspaper page.
>
> That's a pretty good comparision, actually. In newspaper
> layouts, too, there has been a trend toward less visible
> dividing elements recently, e.g. in Germany's prestigious
> FAZ and (I think) in the British Guardian among others
> dividing lines between columns have been removed in the
> latest visual relaunches.
>
> And the thing is, it takes an artist to be aware of the
> graphics trends and expectations of the day as much as
> it takes a programmer to be aware of trends in software
> engineering - the Oxygen guys know fairly well what
> they're doing, what they need is programmer help in im-
> plementing it.

In some applications, such as KOrganizer, I find it difficult to make out what 
controls belong in what group, since the group box boundaries fade away to 
nothing at the bottom of the box. Even the group box titles don't stand out 
as titles since they are in exactly the same font as all the other labels. 
Previously group box titles could be identified by the fact that the group 
box lines "pointed" to them, but now they just sit all by themselves. In 
newspapers, there is more use of distinguishing fonts to show groupings.

But even worse is the difficulty in distinguishing where a dialog begins and 
ends when it overlays another window. Try displaying the KOrganizer settings 
dialog. When it's on top of the KOrganizer main window, it takes some effort 
to see which visual elements are in the dialog and which are in the main 
window. It's all just a slightly varying shade of grey. As Martin said, it 
seems like the old days when everything was in black and white.

All in all, the main impression I get of the Oxygen style is that everything 
looks similar and merges in with everything else, at the expense of 
usability. It's a bit like driving in a fog.

-- 
David Jarvie.
KAlarm author and maintainer.
http://www.astrojar.org.uk/kalarm