Re: 2.3 Feature Request: Inactive toolbar icons

[Christopher James Lahey <clahey ximian com>]

On Fri, 2003-02-07 at 11:12, shaihulud supereva it wrote:
> Jeff Waugh wrote:
> 
> >We're mostly looking for "yes, I am coding >this feature" emails, rather than
> >suggestions. Sorry. :-) You may want to >lodge a GTK+ bug on this, though -
> >it would be much prettier!
> 
> >- Jeff
> 
> Thanks iain for make the patch ! Here is a screenshot:
> http://discomachinegun.prettypeople.org/~iain/insensitive.png
> 
> I think that would be better if the alpha  is scaled down at 75-80%. In this way the inactive icons look better on a light or dark background.


This does look quite pretty.  However, it makes it a lot harder to tell
which buttons are inactive.  In this screenshot, for example, the
boldness of the text is the only thing that tells me that New is active,
and open doesn't have that much color either.

Part of the issue is that on some screens and at some angles, the
different shades of grey don't show up very well.  Having the checks
there makes it possible, even on LCDs, to immediately tell which icons
are sensitive and which are insensitive.

Another case where this is a big deal is if all of the buttons on the
toolbar are sensitive or all are insensitive.  In this case it's even
harder to tell if they are sensitive or not.

I personally don't mind the checks, but if consensus is that they're
ugly, then I agree that we should look for a way to make the toolbars
look better, but we shouldn't do this as the expense of usability.

We should look into different patterns for the checks. Perhaps
decreasing the saturation of the checks or making them larger, but less
pixelated, with smooth borders.  I don't really know.  However, even if
we can't find anything better, removing this usability feature would, I
believe, be the wrong decision.

Thanks,
   Chris