On Sep 30, 2012, at 5:28 PM, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 10:51 AM, John Smith wrote:

...

Recently committed some options for the Swatch/Palette border (Swatch/Palette popup menu Border->None/Solid/Wide). I think there is a good case made (both user acceptance and better distinction) for setting the default border to solid black in the below bug report.

Any interest in changing the default border ?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/171177

Excuse me, but why do we need this, IMO, over-configurability?

That's actually much of the point. There are reasons for borders, and reasons not. We need a good balance here.

IMO the current push in Windows 8 UI and others are examples of not enough configurability.

On Oct 3, 2012, at 10:15 PM, John Smith wrote:

One argument for having a swatch border is that gradients in the Auto palette can blend together [1] Another argument is improved distinction between adjoining swatches [2]

Some people probably prefer to have no swatch border.

So which is a better default .. border or not ?

[1] https://launchpadlibrarian.net/26007562/Capture.PNG [2] https://launchpadlibrarian.net/10579733/borders.png

Now... the interesting thing is that those images can be used to argue the opposite.

That is... with extremely similar colors having a border actually makes it harder for the human eye to spot the differences. On the other hand, human vision is far better at spotting differences when the colors are actually adjacent.

While some might think separating the colors make them easier to pick, with borders it normally is much harder to tell them apart. One problem in figure 2 and figure 1 is that the dark or light border actually affect the way the colors are perceived.

Then in figure 3 The colors being physically against each other actually increase contrast between the colors. One thing that shows up to me is that the colors are easier for me to tell apart (darker than the other, lighter than the other, bluer than the other, etc.)

Another way to spot such items is in color banding of non-dithered images, such as a low bit-depth sky image.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_banding

Overall, I think we have a few things we need to keep balanced.

Separating colors, keeping colors visible, making swatches easy to select, making swatches identifiable as selectable, etc.

If we don't want to worry about making swatches visible as selectable, then a flat border would be better. Ideally a neutral gray would be better than white or black.

A key point, I think, would be to try to see what we can defer to the current theme. GTK+ has a few sets of colors, and leveraging those where possible can help keep our explicit options down. It also has the added benefit of increasing the chance that things will "just work" for more users out of the box, even when they have different preferences.