unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hi Cimi and Otto

Since you are having a theme sprint next week, I've taken a couple of
hours to write up a Top Ten list of my least favorite theme problems in
Natty. (This also prompted me to report some as bugs that weren't
reported already.)

Some of these are implementation bugs. Some are design decisions that
perhaps had unintended consequences. And some may be GTK problems.

- From least to most important:

10. The focus ring for combo boxes and spin boxes is incomplete: it goes
around only three sides, not around the menubutton or spin buttons.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/702504>

9. Progress bar trough corners are rounded but not transparent, and
therefore ugly against any background color other than the default.
Either they should not be rounded (which I would prefer), or they should
be transparent. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/606942>

8. The table column headings in Evolution and in Claws Mail have rounded
corners. This is ugly because it leaves crevices between and around the
headings. It's also inconsistent with the column headings in Nautilus
and Firefox. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/702519>

7. The menubutton for combo boxes (which GTK calls "ComboBoxEntry") has
one triangle pointing downwards, suggesting that the menu (almost
always) opens downwards; this is correct. Option menus (which GTK
erroneously calls "ComboBox") also have only one triangle, pointing
downwards; this is misleading, because the menu opens both upwards and
downwards. Option menus should have a pair of triangles pointing up and
down, as they do in Clearlooks. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/702531>

6. If the first or last item in a menu has a separator adjacent to it,
the item is closer to the end of the menu than it is to the separator,
which doesn't really make sense. Cimi has already fixed this, the fix
just hasn't appeared in Natty yet. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/659866>

5. The only distinction between the title of an open menu and the title
of a closed one is an outline drawn in a slightly different shade of
black. This makes it difficult to tell which menu is open (especially at
the trailing end of the menu bar, where several indicator menus hug the
edge of the screen), and it is inconsistent with the highlighting used
for submenu titles and other menu items. The simple solution is to use
the same white-on-orange highlighting for menu titles as you do for menu
items. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/702536>

4. Rounded scrollbar buttons work okay in dialog-style windows, because
they aren't touching anything. But they look ugly in document-style
windows, where the scrollbar touches anything else -- for example
Nautilus, Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice.org, Terminal, or Ubuntu
Software Center. The corners need to be square.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/702544>

3. The title bar of a window that has its own menus appears to be one
pixel taller than the title bar of a window that hasn't. (I guess what
is really happening is that the menu bar is still being displayed, one
pixel high.)

2. There is very little difference between the title bar of the focused
window vs. unfocused windows. For the unified menu bar to work well,
this distinction needs to be crystal clear.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/534799>

1. There is no difference between the light grey chrome color of the
focused window and the light grey chrome color of unfocused windows.
Again, this distinction needs to be crystal clear.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/534799>

0. Ambiance uses a dark menu bar, which is needlessly hard to read,
inconsistent with the rest of the theme
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/573292>, makes disabled menu titles
practically invisible <http://launchpad.net/bugs/627796>, and causes
dark-on-light option menus and combo boxes to unexpectedly become
light-on-dark when they unroll <http://launchpad.net/bugs/533175>. This
was a deliberate decision, though, so I'm not expecting that it will be
fixed in the near future.

I could list many other visual glitches, but that's probably enough for
a start. :-)

Cheers
- -- 
mpt
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