Re: [ui-best-practices-working-group] form toolkit look and feel

[Kimberley Peter <kpeter@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Eugene,

The rendering on Mac is a technical issue I can't address but I can say
that the forms look and feel, where controls like buttons show up, should
take on the native look and feel. In the Mac case, they should be Mac
buttons. If this isn't happening, then a bug is your best way to vie for
changes.

As for having the UI forms topic for one of our sessions, +1 from me. Dejan
Glozic should be in on that one if he's available.

There are no guidelines as yet in the 3.x draft document but there is some
existing documentation to give guidance, i.e.,
http://www.eclipse.org/eclipse/platform-ua/proposals/forms/enhancements-3.3
/index.html

Also, there is a bug that records this as a guideline topic:
https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=180272

And a working topic in the wiki where some initial content notes have been
made:
http://wiki.eclipse.org/UI_Forms


- Kim
...................................................................
UI Design . Rational Software
IBM Toronto Media Design Studio




                                                                           
             Eugene Kuleshov                                               
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                                       [ui-best-practices-working-group]   
                                       form toolkit look and feel          
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  It would be interesting to hear opinion of the UI working group
members about Forms Toolkit look and feel. There are somehow abstract
guidelines about using and applicability of the Forms Toolkit in the
Eclipse UI guidelines and perhaps those need to be clarified. It is
actually been brought up by one of the users, but I don't want to link
that discussion here because it been somehow heated. Since reporter
stated that he won't be bringing it to the UI group attention, I am
taking the liberty to do so in a hope that I will be able to reflect his
concerns.

  So, the complain was about the flattenes of the UI based on the Forms
Toolkit and that it looks quite alien on Mac OS X (flat square buttons
vs. Mac's roundish fancy buttons). Then reporter evolved his own theory
that it is ok to have flat buttons in some cases (like editing
properties), but it is not ok to use those flat buttons if they somehow
related to actions on the data behind given form. He used Mylyn's Task
Editor as example and demanded "Submit" button to be made non-flat for
this reason and after that tried to generalize the use case around
action-related buttons.

  While Submit button in Mylyn's Task Editor has other issues (not
really related to this topic, and Mik might be talking about that on one
of the meetings), my interpretation of Forms Toolkit guidelines is that
all widgets inside the same form should be using consistent look,
regardless of their actions, hence the whole issue of "weird-looking"
buttons on Mac OS X need to be addressed globally, so all buttons should
look consistent, and rendered consistently with the platform UI (even
when using SWT.FLAT flag).

  What do you think?

  regards,
  Eugene


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