RoboGeek

Making UI's nice by tweaking L&F Earlier I'd posted about the Tiny LAF and then in the midst of posting got lost on a tangential train of thought about the visual presentation of information, and whether the L&F improves that visual presentation or degrades it.

I see a similar train of thought in Roman Guy's posting: About Plastic Look and Feel

He goes through improving a simple (and supposedly ugly) Swing app, by switching to the Plastic L&F and then tweaking a few parameters.

Now, really, ugly is in the eye of the beholder, isn't it?  Or is it only beauty that's in the eye of the beholder?  Is there some concrete measurement you can make to say something is ugly?

But, getting to Roman's exercise.  What I see as the essential changes were to remove some of the border effects, which in the visual presentation removed some lines, and as a result also depended on mouseover behavior to indicate where the buttons and other GUI components are.

In a way that validates the point I tried to make in my earlier tangents.  Namely ... it seems to me the more lines that are drawn to indicate a GUI component, the more cluttered is the screen.  But by providing mouseover interactions, and at the same time providing the button icon/imagry (without the button border) you're able to convey where the buttons are, without also intruding button borders into the GUI.

A couple of the commenters in Roman's blog said they preferred the first one over the Plastic L&F.  Specifically someone said they didn't like having to mouseover to determine which are buttons and which are just imagry.  Clearly to some people those lines that make up the button border have a role to play, while for others they are clutter.

I think an interesting point here is that Swing offers the ability to customize the L&F in its core competency.  To the people who diss Swing for being "ugly", and not native-like, I wonder why they don't feel constrained when the native GUI toolkit forces you to a given L&F?

I know, that kind of freedom is a mixed bag ... I remember evaluating GUI toolkits back in 1992 when Motif and Win3.1 were the kings, but my team needed a cross platform GUI toolkit, and we came across Neuron Data who supplied one, and they did what seemed at the time an outrageous thing.  They could switch L&F dynamically at runtime.  At the time I didn't like this -- falling into the mainstream logic that the end users (Aunt Millie and the like) would be confused with applications on their screen that appeared different than the other applications.

Well, back then that seemed like a valid argument.  Today the platform vendors can't seem to decide for certain what their native L&F is supposed to look like.  e.g. on Mac OS X it started out with this striped theme, that shifted to a theme that looked like lickably sweet gumdrops, and now we've got this weird miglosh of the lickably sweet gumdrops and this brushed metal look that was supposed to only be for multimedia app's, but has now been applied to Finder and Safari.  And don't get me started about Windows and their strange attempts to make the desktop into a web page.

I think in todays environment the end users, even the Aunt Millie's, are accustomed to a variety of L&F's appearing on the same desktop.  I think that so long as the app designers are reasonable in terms of making buttons appear/behave as buttons, menus appear/behave as menus, etc, and that they don't do completely outrageous things, that they can get away with rendering the GUI components in different ways and most people will be okay.


(2005-07-25 16:11:54.0) Permalink Comments [0]