bulia byak wrote:
On 1/8/06, MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> wrote:
As for the slash, it's not just Adobe, Macromedia's done it forever too. I'd say it's a pretty well-established convention for graphics applications. Admittedly, I don't know about Xara...
Xara has no red slash, but uses just clear checkers in the indicator (i.e. there's no difference between no fill and fully transparent fill). However, for stroke, there's another indicator that shows stroke width, and there it displays "None" for no stroke. That's where I look when I need to find out if an object has a stroke or not.
This raises a problem: what is 'clear' and what is grey, or the chosen background color of your UI?
I have this problem when using Macromedia Dreamweaver - when selecting text color, the 'default color' is the same grey of my UI as if I had selected #CCCCCC. Big problem if I actually have selected grey, or clicked on the edge of my screen by accident. I'd suggest a variant on the Illustrator questionmarks perhaps?
We should definately avoid a direct copy of the Adobe/Macromedia red slash - both companies have a history of suing each other for these patented UIs. They get away with it by paying each other large sums of money and by one company buying up bits of the other, the way patenting works.
I'd need something to show me the difference between having selected the grey of my UI by mistake, or requiring a grey color, and 'none / unset'. Again, we can't copy the questionmarks that Illustrator uses, but they are useful, particularly when working with multiple selections - Illustrator uses questionmarks for 'unable to display', as opposed to the red slash for 'none set'. I would have no objections to using questionmarks for both options, but I'm curious to investigate how other F/OSS graphics software displays 'none set'. Are we lucky enough to get away with the red slash? Is it universal enough to be freely usable, or is it likely to be yet another tiny bit of patented UI that everyone happens to consider universal simply because Adobe/Macromedia monopolise the field of professional design software?
mC~