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Which clock and calendar style do you like best?


Winstep's amazing glossy style
57%
[ 4 ]
Ric's plain black background style
43%
[ 3 ]

Total votes : 7
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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 6:20 am 
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While I will agree that Ric's is easier to read, I like Jorge's digital clock better. I would actually like to see the date done in a similar manner instead of the flip style. Although the flip style brings back nostalgia to my dad's clock he had when I was a kid.

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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 6:37 am 
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I have a totally radical, completely ridiculous, stupendously crazy idea. What if Jorge, the creator of an awesome suite of programs that has an amazing ability to be customized, allowed us to choose right inside the program?

  1. Old clunky appearance (proposed by young farts) - Note, this option has extra visual noise present.
  2. New sleek look (proposed by old farts) - Note, this option is clean and displays the content very well. (Reminder: The content is the time and/or date. The content is NOT the unlit LCD character remnants or the old-school iPhone/iPad reflection thingy that they don't use anymore or the mechanical flip silliness. [Goes to check the Apple site to make sure about the reflection and, whew!, he's correct.] Form should follow function, not the other way around, you silly personages who voted WRONG!)

:mrgreen:


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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 11:07 am 
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vectornut wrote:
While I will agree that Ric's is easier to read, I like Jorge's digital clock better. I would actually like to see the date done in a similar manner instead of the flip style. Although the flip style brings back nostalgia to my dad's clock he had when I was a kid.

Here we go. :) Paul, it's *NOT* the *style/icon* itself (though the calender icon would need modification for the new style text) that I suggest should be changed but rather, just the text arrangements and fonts. This is entirely that evil Jorge's fault for setting totally the wrong questions to skew the results of the poll in his conservative favour. :P

With the new fonts etc. you could still would have the option of the old style icons - if there's a theme that uses different backgrounds, all you have to do is either rename or delete the file "WsClockD.*" in the theme.

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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 11:21 am 
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DesertDwarf wrote:
I have a totally radical, completely ridiculous, stupendously crazy idea. What if Jorge, the creator of an awesome suite of programs that has an amazing ability to be customized, allowed us to choose right inside the program?

  1. Old clunky appearance (proposed by young farts) - Note, this option has extra visual noise present.
  2. New sleek look (proposed by old farts) - Note, this option is clean and displays the content very well. (Reminder: The content is the time and/or date. The content is NOT the unlit LCD character remnants or the old-school iPhone/iPad reflection thingy that they don't use anymore or the mechanical flip silliness. [Goes to check the Apple site to make sure about the reflection and, whew!, he's correct.] Form should follow function, not the other way around, you silly personages who voted WRONG!)

:mrgreen:

LOL! Ric, you more or less hit the nail on the head. (Though I don't think we're 'old farts' just yet, and Paul OTOH is no spring chicken either as he's also been with the programme from very early on. ;) )

Having two styles of defaults for the digital in-shelf/-dock clock as you seem to propose could of course always be an option I suppose. But....

The real beef of course is that Jorge misleads everybody by posing the completely wrong propositions, i.e., that it's the background/icon that's to be changed. (Hell we can do that anyway!) Which of course it isn't - it's the actual information content and the way it's presented that is at issue here, i.e., the text arrangements and the fonts. Argh! :P

Clarity and legibility of information content is what matters here, and Paul has just confirmed above that my presentation of same *is* the more legible one. :)

Jorge, pull your finger out mate and correct those utterly misleading poll propositions! ;)

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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 12:14 pm 
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Ok, all joking aside, I said I was going to give my very honest opinion and I will go a step further than that, I am going to be brutally honest (Ric is a grown man and he can take the heat lol):

Ric has been pressuring me for what seems like ages now to make iconic modules free skinning.

This is just more of the same as should be obvious by Ric's 'With the new fonts etc. you could still would have the option of the old style icons...' statement above.

Each time he approached the subject I have replied with a categoric "NO, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN" and I explained why more than once.

But Ric is stubborn, so he keeps nagging me in different ways (which sometimes does get on my nerves as I am trying to fry much bigger fish and this little hand keeps pulling on my sleeve, disrupting my train of thought).

I'll say again: it will never happen.

As for form vs. function: I don't think you will find ANY other customization application out there were so much thought went to - and so much emphasis was put on - functionality.

What you really need to understand is that it might be functionality that makes the user STAY, but it's the EYE CANDY that SELLS. Steve Jobs knew this very well, and I too learned this very precious lesson years ago.

On one side you have the PC world, where anything can be customized but most of it is butt ugly (including unimaginative beige cases for YEARS!) on the other side you have Apple, where every little thing is a work of art but is not very flexible at all.

What you need is balance. Don't use functionality as an excuse to turn everything into beige cases.

Why do you think WindowBlinds no longer sells? Because once Microsoft realized how important eye candy also is they 'beautified' Windows (starting with Vista) in such a way that the OS is now 'good enough' in terms of aesthetics - as a result 99% of all the WB themes out there became WORSE than the real thing, which instantly made WB obsolete.

Users already have a choice of two different styles per each iconic module. They can even change the *background* of most of the iconic modules. That is as far as it will EVER go and I am not going to explain why again.

Also, what matters if a module is still readable at 16x16 if the price to pay is the same module being butt ugly at 128x128?!

What, I could make different versions of the same module for each icon size, you say?! No, that would not work for a TON of reasons, and no thanks, I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot like that either. :)

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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 1:42 pm 
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winstep wrote:
Ok, all joking aside, I said I was going to give my very honest opinion and I will go a step further than that, I am going to be brutally honest (Ric is a grown man and he can take the heat lol):

Ric has been pressuring me for what seems like ages now to make iconic modules free skinning.

This is just more of the same as should be obvious by Ric's 'With the new fonts etc. you could still would have the option of the old style icons...' statement above.

Each time he approached the subject I have replied with a categoric "NO, IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN" and I explained why more than once.

But Ric is stubborn, so he keeps nagging me in different ways (which sometimes does get on my nerves as I am trying to fry much bigger fish and this little hand keeps pulling on my sleeve, disrupting my train of thought).

I'll say again: it will never happen.

As for form vs. function: I don't think you will find ANY other customization application out there were so much thought went to - and so much emphasis was put on - functionality.

What you really need to understand is that it might be functionality that makes the user STAY, but it's the EYE CANDY that SELLS. Steve Jobs knew this very well, and I too learned this very precious lesson years ago.

On one side you have the PC world, where anything can be customized but most of it is butt ugly (including unimaginative beige cases for YEARS!) on the other side you have Apple, where every little thing is a work of art but is not very flexible at all.

What you need is balance. Don't use functionality as an excuse to turn everything into beige cases.

Why do you think WindowBlinds no longer sells? Because once Microsoft realized how important eye candy also is they 'beautified' Windows (starting with Vista) in such a way that the OS is now 'good enough' in terms of aesthetics - as a result 99% of all the WB themes out there became WORSE than the real thing, which instantly made WB obsolete.

Users already have a choice of two different styles per each iconic module. They can even change the *background* of most of the iconic modules. That is as far as it will EVER go and I am not going to explain why again.

Also, what matters if a module is still readable at 16x16 if the price to pay is the same module being butt ugly at 128x128?!

What, I could make different versions of the same module for each icon size, you say?! No, that would not work for a TON of reasons, and no thanks, I'm not about to shoot myself in the foot like that either. :)

Jorge, as I said at the outset of this thread, this is *NOT* about anything like free-form skinning for iconified modules, it is merely about improving the defaults of the clock and perhaps calender modules.

All that would be needed to accomplish this is, in the case of the clock, change the text by dropping that weekday line, moving the time text up a bit and adding the short format date below, and using a better, cleaner, clearer and more legible font. The icon itself could stay exactly as it is. And in the case of the calender, yes, the icon would need some minor modification - it would just need to be cropped, getting rid of all that wasted transparent space and thus making the icon itself large enough to accommodate a better font. (And capitalisation would help, as can be seen very clearly in my examples.)

No need for any free-form skinning. With the choice of background already available, the skinner can do his own and specify the font colour. (And so could the user.) I repeat, I do not advocate or ask for free-form skinning here. And as I've already stated more than once here already, this is *not* what this is about, it's not even about changing the default icons but just advocating improving the actual informational content in the form of the text and fonts.

Of course, it's your choice to distort the whole thing into a free-form/different icon thing, just as it was your choice to completely mislead people with the poll propositions which state that it's about background.

Ooh, and suddenly you're advocating ignoring 16 px. icons in favour of good 128 px. ones? How quaint, how odd Jorge. ISTR that you always placed great emphasis on the importance of how 16 px. icons look.... :P

As for 'form follows function', in this case (the other) Ric is right - the informational content of the current default does not adhere to this principle but solely relies on the perceived eye-candy factor.(Which is itself debatable IMO.)

The images say it all wrt the point of this exercise - clarity of information content. Clarity, cleanness, legibility. Text becomes pointless when it is less than that.


:Edit: And as for nagging you Jorge and sometimes getting on your nerves - didn't you realise that that is in my job description? ;) You need to be nagged and have your views/ideas challenged, in fact we all do of course. And I'm challenging/nagging only because I consider you a friend and not the enemy, and in the hope of helping to make Winstep even better than it already is, and that (challenging, that is) is something that sadly doesn't seem to happen here too often anymore. Naturally I may not and indeed am not always right, but hopefully I may be even just once in a while. :)

And in this particular case of suggesting a minor change to the text and fonts (and *not* the icon itself!) I feel I am right. Come on Jorge, you know I am. You know it makes sense. ;)

As for the icon (the calender one, which would need slight modification) - I'll gladly crop off all that empty (transparent) space and resize it for you to prove the point. I can't say fairer than that. :/Edit/

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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 7:30 pm 
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Just to further illustrate the point of changing the text and fonts, here are the clock and calender at 128 px. in-shelf within my new 'Win 10 Productivity' theme seen here : https://forums.winstep.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=10870
Attachment:
File comment: The current default text and font with background as per 'Win 10 Productivity' theme, 128 px. size
001023_Example-OrglTxtClocl+Cal.png
001023_Example-OrglTxtClocl+Cal.png [ 37.07 KiB | Viewed 11360 times ]

Compare the black-and-grey outline of the clock - this is the full icon area - with the amount of empty space around the calender. Plenty of scope to crop and resize that. And the quaint old LCD matrix font still is confusing even at this size! (Did the screen grabs at 128 px. as Jorge now seems to have a thing about this size having to look good. Well Jorge, to be frank, the LCD matrix doesn't look good. At any size. :P )

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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Fri Nov 02, 2018 8:56 pm 
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nexter wrote:
Well Jorge, to be frank, the LCD matrix doesn't look good. At any size. :P )

+1 on this


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 Post subject: Re: Better Default Icons For In-Shelf Clock and Calender?
PostPosted: Sun Nov 04, 2018 3:14 am 
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seeker wrote:
nexter wrote:
Well Jorge, to be frank, the LCD matrix doesn't look good. At any size. :P )

+1 on this

Thanks seeker. :) See Jorge? Almost everyone here so far prefers a cleaner, clearer default font - which is all I'm asking, and a slight change to the clock text.

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