GUI and interface suggestions [pics]...

Post by **nikos** » 2007 Jun 22, 07:28

you know i don't like skins
but whoever wants to design a better toolbar icon set for a free pro licence, the competition is open

vserghi · Post by **vserghi** » 2007 Jun 22, 08:28

Irfanview has gone thorugh a similar change recently for the v4 release. It allowed users to choose a different toolbar icon set, to the default one. Users designed these toolbar icons sets and were put onto the web site for anyone to download and use.

This small change to the button icons, made a suprsing difference to the look and feel of the program.

Perhaps a similar approach can be used for x2. You could possible do the change when you code to allow different icons for the custom commands.

snakebyte · Post by **snakebyte** » 2007 Jun 22, 08:33

Nikos, can you move this competition to a new thread? I would also like to have icons for menu commands which currently do not have icons associated with them. This way we can add more commands to the toolbar.

Icon should be available in 16x16, 32x32 and 48x48 sizes. Any comment on this? How about active, hover and disabled icon states?

ZoNi · Post by **ZoNi** » 2007 Jun 22, 09:16

nikos wrote:but whoever wants to design a better toolbar icon set for a free pro licence, the competition is open

great! but, I guess, you will first have to add official support for those icon-sets, so they can be tested...

@ vserghi: hehe, thanks for remaind me of IrfanView - now it has some realy nice icons (skins)!
http://www.irfanview.com/skins.htm

vserghi · Post by **vserghi** » 2007 Jun 22, 09:50

No problems.

I keep on switching between IrfanView and FastStone Image Viewer. Still prefer Fastone, looks wise, but IrfanView has got a lot going for it still.

Post by **nikos** » 2007 Jun 22, 12:40

another complication is that icons are shared among toolbar & menus. So there has to be a version at 16x16 pixels and a larger one for the toolbar. We'll keep this in mind for x2 v4

ZoNi · Post by **ZoNi** » 2007 Jun 22, 23:56

nikos wrote:We'll keep this in mind for x2 v4

ok. I guess this is your final answer (=no "icon-sets" support)?

paNET · Post by **paNET** » 2007 Jun 23, 00:30

nikos wrote:another complication is that icons are shared among toolbar & menus. So there has to be a version at 16x16 pixels and a larger one for the toolbar. We'll keep this in mind for x2 v4

With a good tool for creating icons, there is no problem to make a complete set in the same .ico file (16, 24... 128, True Color, 256 Colors ... etc)

Reagrding these problems with the icons and colors for tabs, I have to agree that some situations require them. Let me explain:

At home, I have no toolbar opened and the problem of small icons doesn't exist

And this is possible because I have shortcuts for all my bookmarks I frequently used and these are not many. In the same time, with few opened tabs, I can easily switch between the folders I need.

A different situation is at my office, where, under pressure of time, I have to sort/open/move/copy/delete hundreds of files/day. In this situation, even if I'm using shortcuts for bookmarks, folder groups and custom commands on the toolbar, the larger icons and colored tabs could help me much. I tried to use custom icons for starting folders to identify faster what I need, but when I "dive" deep in those folders, the icons are changing. This is, for example, a situation in which the possibility to set the color of the tab let us identify faster the tab we need.

paNET · Post by **paNET** » 2007 Jun 23, 00:43

And because we are talking here about GUI improvements, I want to suggest you to use a more evident way to show that a folder is filtered. It happened few times that I filtered some folders and later, in the same day, when I needed to clear the location of the projects, I opened those folders, I forget that they were filtered and I didn't see the insignificant icon on the right corner. And I erased them. (with Shift, of course :lol: )

snakebyte · Post by **snakebyte** » 2007 Jun 23, 00:50

nikos wrote:another complication is that icons are shared among toolbar & menus. So there has to be a version at 16x16 pixels and a larger one for the toolbar. We'll keep this in mind for x2 v4

It is possible to have mutliple sizes of icons in the same file. You should be able to programatically extract 16x16 icons for menu and 32x32 icons for toolbar (though, I would prefer small icons for toolbar as well)

I would advice you to download and try Microanglo Librarian. On the following link switch to librarian tab and you can see multiple sizes of same icon in one library file. Try loading system32\shell32.dll in Librarian to view multiple sizes of window icons.

http://www.microangelo.us/icon-editor.asp

fgagnon · Post by **fgagnon** » 2007 Jun 23, 03:51

paNET,

@ ... a more evident way to show that a folder is filtered -

The second time I did what you did, I concluded that my first solution of being more careful simply wasn't good enough. So I changed the background color for my filtered folders to an amber shade. The active filtered background color is specified in the registry key: rgbFilterBgcol

I also have confused myself more than once between the Active and Inactive panes, so I customized those colors to make it obvious which is which.

FWIW, the color settings (x2 registry keys) which I use to remind me of the situation are the following:
rgbActiveBgcol [REG_DWORD] = d0fbd8 {mint green for GO}
rgbFilterBgcol [REG_DWORD] = 90f0fa {amber for CAUTION}
rgbInactiveBgcol [REG_DWORD] = d0c0de {dusty rose for STOP, INACTIVE}

and if you don't want to edit the registry directly, you can set ...
the Inactive BG color within x2 from Tools | Options | Window > Inactive background ...
and the Active and Filtered panel BG colors using the new x²settings editor tool.

HTH
-fg-

Post by **nikos** » 2007 Jun 23, 05:31

i'll rethink this toolbar "skinning" for the next version

paNET · Post by **paNET** » 2007 Jun 23, 20:23

fgagnon,

Many, many thanks for your suggestion. Your advice remembered me to read carefully that file with "exotic" options from the beginning to the last line. 10x again!

whomung · Post by **whomung** » 2007 Jul 12, 08:41

Nikos

I had a request for dual tree's as an option, integrated like Dir Opus... Using X2's /P flag is OK.... but I think the single window, dual trees tied to the respective file window --designed as an easily toggled option, is cleaner approach.....

TsunamiZ · Post by **TsunamiZ** » 2007 Sep 15, 18:31

nikos, any plans on implement some of these interface options soon? i would still like to see more options for tabs display.