[Monodevelop-devel] MonoDevelop UI feedback

[Michael Hutchinson]

2010/4/16 Levi Bard <taktaktaktaktaktaktaktaktaktak at gmail.com>:
> I thought I'd share some constructive consistency-/polish-related
> feedback on MD's evolving UI, from Unity's Nicholas Francis.
> (Hopefully my mail client hasn't mangled the graphic insertion too badly.)

It did :/

> =====
>
> Why does the toolbar on the right (don't know what it's called) use a
> smaller widget size and have an underline?

Not sure why the font size is different. Should probably use the
smaller size in both cases. Please file bug.

The underline at the bottom is part of the theme. Looks like looks
like a minor vertical positioning inconsistency between the toolbars
is causing the visual inconsistency. Doesn't seem to be reproducible.
Maybe it'll go away when font size it fixed anyway.

> ==================================================================
>
> I like the less boxed version of the UI, but some details were missed out:
>
> If there's a theme of grey background behind windows, that needs to be
> fairly consistent. This was missed e.g. here:
>
> I'd also make sure the dark border is present here:

If I understand what you're saying, I think it's an optical illusion,
and the shadow is present, but the adjacent colours make it look
different?

> ==================================================================
>
> It looks to me like you want to make it look like the
> which-function-am-I-editing-dropdown should take over the entire
> window (which is nice and a lot less noisy than the old version).
>
> However, you've got 5 px at the top (you can see the seperator lines
> don't extend all the way). Also, the top of the toolbar doesn't match
> color with the outline border giving it a weird wavy 'curve' from the
> shading. You also can't click the top 5 px. I'd say you should just
> lose them and pull up the toolbar.

IIRC the 5px padding is a hardcoded limitations of GtkNotebook, and
will go away when we move to instead use dock frames for the content
area, in MD 2.6.

> ==================================================================
> Your bordering of scrollviews is inconsistent:
>
> The one on the left is esp. weird: you have a 2px grey inset between
> scrollbars and content, but no hard line. Being a Mac user, I'd just
> lose spacing on both sides. Either way, it should probably be
> consistent.

The border around the inside of the ScrolledWindow seen on the left is
a GTK issue, IIRC either hardcoded or part of the theme. IMO it's
wasted space, but tricky/impossible to fix in MD itself.

On the right, we have set the option to add a frame on the inside of
the ScrolledWindow, which wastes *even more* space. We did try
removing it a while ago, but it made the edge of the text editor
surface indistinct in some cases.

Possibly we need a custom ScrolledWindow to fix these issues properly.

> ==================================================================
>
> Why is this right side of the status bar darker grey than the left?
>
> Maybe just make the entire status line a bit darker? We do that in
> Unity, and readability is not really a problem (even on 2.2 gamma
> monitors)

The right side is not part of the status bar. The status bar was
condensed onto the same line as the autohidden pads, saving vertical
space.

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com