Comments on: Distinguishing windows that look too similar http://stealthisidea.com/articles/finder-colorization/ Philip Haine's articles on Product Vision, Innovation and Design Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:38:16 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 By: Paul Baclace http://stealthisidea.com/articles/finder-colorization/comment-page-1/#comment-7834 Paul Baclace Tue, 11 Jan 2011 22:37:30 +0000 http://stealthisidea.com/?p=470#comment-7834 I have the same problem. The visual hint for window-that-has-focus is not good enough. This became very noticeable when I switched to OSX Mac; years ago on Windows I used to set radically different frame colors for active vs. non-active, but more sophisticated design there eventually prevented it. A drop shadow and slight luminance difference is insufficient without plenty of saccades. Aging eyes don't help either. Going back further in history, X11 customization was insanely non-standard. The practice was each application had a completely different set of custom settings and rarely had a difference between active/inactive. Earlier window systems did not support any customization of app appearance. I have seen one hack related to rollup windows on OSX that would blur the inactive windows. Cool idea, but somewhat risky. Slightly related to this, somebody please steal this idea, I would like to see focus stealing be impossible: You're typing away, and an unrelated window pops up an takes your focus, keystrokes go there instead and the return key maps to "Yes", the popup disappears in a flash and you wonder "what did I just approve?" It might only happen twice a year, but one time is too many. I have the same problem. The visual hint for window-that-has-focus is not good enough. This became very noticeable when I switched to OSX Mac; years ago on Windows I used to set radically different frame colors for active vs. non-active, but more sophisticated design there eventually prevented it. A drop shadow and slight luminance difference is insufficient without plenty of saccades. Aging eyes don’t help either.

Going back further in history, X11 customization was insanely non-standard. The practice was each application had a completely different set of custom settings and rarely had a difference between active/inactive. Earlier window systems did not support any customization of app appearance.

I have seen one hack related to rollup windows on OSX that would blur the inactive windows. Cool idea, but somewhat risky.

Slightly related to this, somebody please steal this idea, I would like to see focus stealing be impossible: You’re typing away, and an unrelated window pops up an takes your focus, keystrokes go there instead and the return key maps to “Yes”, the popup disappears in a flash and you wonder “what did I just approve?” It might only happen twice a year, but one time is too many.

]]> By: Dave Cortright http://stealthisidea.com/articles/finder-colorization/comment-page-1/#comment-2368 Dave Cortright Sat, 27 Dec 2008 07:29:27 +0000 http://stealthisidea.com/?p=470#comment-2368 A goal I'd add to this is to minimize or ideally eliminate any active action by the user. If the user is required to take action before this feature is useful, as is the case in color-coding, then it will only be useful to an order of magnitude less users. You could auto-color the windows; however the heuristics for doing this aren't obvious and the results may then just appear as random noise. I'm a big fan of watermark text. How about for blurred windows, place watermarked text over the entire window with the type & title of the window (folder name, search criteria, app & file name...). A goal I’d add to this is to minimize or ideally eliminate any active action by the user. If the user is required to take action before this feature is useful, as is the case in color-coding, then it will only be useful to an order of magnitude less users.

You could auto-color the windows; however the heuristics for doing this aren’t obvious and the results may then just appear as random noise.

I’m a big fan of watermark text. How about for blurred windows, place watermarked text over the entire window with the type & title of the window (folder name, search criteria, app & file name…).

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