Project Tree improvements
Moderator: Moderators
Just tested the new build, the green color really doesn't work too well for me.
Would it be possible to just have it the way it was before but with an option (maybe in preferences) to simply make comments look 50% transparent (middle color of what the theme is using for rendering Project Tree's background and text)? At 50% the contrast between the background and comments is still strong enough that they can be read, and the difference between comments and the first part of the Project Tree entry is strong enough to differentiate them.
This way it'd work with both bright and dark themes (they already use the opposite tonal values for rendering the text and the background). Even themes that use a say 80% black text on white background should work? And people who don't like it can turn it off if it were a preference setting.
If not, I think the old version worked better.
Would it be possible to just have it the way it was before but with an option (maybe in preferences) to simply make comments look 50% transparent (middle color of what the theme is using for rendering Project Tree's background and text)? At 50% the contrast between the background and comments is still strong enough that they can be read, and the difference between comments and the first part of the Project Tree entry is strong enough to differentiate them.
This way it'd work with both bright and dark themes (they already use the opposite tonal values for rendering the text and the background). Even themes that use a say 80% black text on white background should work? And people who don't like it can turn it off if it were a preference setting.
If not, I think the old version worked better.
After switching directly from the old build, it took me a slight bit to get used to, but I tried it with a few themes and I found it much easier to distinguish the "head" from the comments ("tail"?), especially with themes that use literal contrasts (100% vs 0%). My default Turquoise Gray uses a slightly lower contrats but it still works. Maybe the bright part needs a bit of tweaking (50% is maybe too transparent, maybe it should be 60%?) but that's fine tuning.
For me the biggest readability problem with uniform text rendering was constant scanning of the whole line while looking for the start of the comments. Now it is immediately obvious where the comments start so my eye can jump right to that point!
If this still causes problems for others I can't think of any better solution
The only other thing that springs to mind is to use a thick bullet point to divide the name / comments parts (I saw it often used effectively by Japanese developers) but here it'd become messy as soon as one starts adding more comments so that wouldn't work...
For me the biggest readability problem with uniform text rendering was constant scanning of the whole line while looking for the start of the comments. Now it is immediately obvious where the comments start so my eye can jump right to that point!
If this still causes problems for others I can't think of any better solution
The only other thing that springs to mind is to use a thick bullet point to divide the name / comments parts (I saw it often used effectively by Japanese developers) but here it'd become messy as soon as one starts adding more comments so that wouldn't work...I use comments quite extensively in my projects; and if used, they bring usually more important information that e.g. type of the component for me. That's why I'm interesting in this, virtually unimportant, topic.rrTea wrote:If this still causes problems for others I can't think of any better solution
But what about to add a settings item for color of comments to ZGE? Everybody could use own color, depending on the preferred theme; as already suggested. Ville?
I'm also using comments quite extensively, that's why it bothered me that I have to scan the whole line instead of jumping immediately to what I'm looking for (in most cases the comment) 
Today I worked in ZGE for a few hours with the 50% blend and after a while I got seriously used to it... as if it were always like that! I feel like this is definitely an improvement over the old version.
(Still didn't manage to download the "75%" build!)
VilleK: If it is a bit impractical to implement the full blown customization options etc, maybe just a tickbox in the preferences so it can be turned off?
Today I worked in ZGE for a few hours with the 50% blend and after a while I got seriously used to it... as if it were always like that! I feel like this is definitely an improvement over the old version.
(Still didn't manage to download the "75%" build!)
VilleK: If it is a bit impractical to implement the full blown customization options etc, maybe just a tickbox in the preferences so it can be turned off?
But the unique IDE is such a big part of ZGE ^^;;; (and I had one other suggestion regarding interface)VilleK wrote:...I'm lazy when it comes to user interface changes
Sorry for being such a pedant, maybe it's my occupational disease but... 75% transparency is inconsistent with some other parts of the interface, for example with the "Add component" window (which uses the "correct / standard" tonal values for text division).
Also with bright themes, when performing the jump from say Preview window to Project Tree it's a bit hard to immediately distinguish between the "head" and the comment if they're just 25% different: it looks as if there were a mistake in rendering, not a deliberate separation between the two.
Edit: I found a theme that works well for me (for some reason Lavender theme renders the comments brigther than some other themes), so I'm happy!