Re: [Usability] My take on Nautilus must-fix proposal

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Wed, Oct 24, 2001 at 04:03:58PM -0700, Adam Elman wrote:
> 2) Fix Nautilus' behavior of having light-colored text on a 
> light-colored background if a light-colored theme is selected. 
> Maciej suggested that this is a heuristic that needs tuning, and I 
> think that's reasonable.  I do not think that Brian's suggestion of 
> allowing the user to directly customize the text color is necessarily 
> the right solution; I think it'd be much better for Nautilus simply 
> to Do The Right Thing (tm).

I think I've suggested this before a long time ago (but never felt compelled
enough to even try and implement it :).  If you print white and black fonts
offset by one or two pixels in the x and y direction you will get a shadow
effect which will make it more readable even if nautilus doesn't pick the
right color.  I like to have light backgrounds which do have some dark spots,
currently nautilus will make the icon text white making it completely
unusable (the desktop).  The heurestic needs to be based on the area of the
icon only, not of the entire desktop.

Or nautilus could add some shading behind the text, which would improve
readability a lot more.  Perhaps it could be made so that it only makes sure
that a region of pixels behind the text is dark/light enough to have high
enough contrast with white/black text.  So it would not shade any pixel if
there was already enough contrast.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   A clever man commits no minor blunders.
                       -- Goethe