On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 08:41 -0400, Liam R E Quin wrote: > On Tue, 2007-06-05 at 11:27 +0100, Calum Benson wrote: > > On Sat, 2007-06-02 at 10:59 +0100, Phil Bull wrote: > > > > > Evolution has a similar control [1]. Rather than having a red 'close' > > > button appear, it has a greyed-out 'clear' icon, permanently to the > > > right of the text entry. When you type something into the text entry, it > > > becomes sensitive/colourful. > > > > Unfortunately, it also takes on the colour of focused+selected text, > > which means it looks like the text field is focused even when it > > isn't :/ Not a mistake we want to repeat elsewhere. > > Actually it goes blue - if this is the colour of selected text for > you, that's a coincidence based on your theme as far as I can tell. > Of course, Gnome may well be presented to users with a default > theme in which that's true, too. > > Providing visual indication is a good idea, but colour might > not be the best way to do it. > > Evolution also has bugs whereby the displayed list of messages > often does not correspond to the contents of the search box, > which can lead me to think eg, there are no matches when there > really are. But most themes, including our default theme, use blue as the selection color. Even if it's not the same blue, it's still close enough to possibly cause confusion. I've attached a mockup of using background colors/patterns to indicate state. I've used yellow for an active field, and a striped yellow for a field that has content that's inconsistent with whatever else is being shown. I've used red for an error color. What would be nice is if GTK+ had a better API than just setting the background to an explicit color. It would be good to retain some flexibility, but we clearly want the theme to be able to do its job well. -- Shaun
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