XYplorer Beta Club

I may be in the minority, but on my 1024x768 LCD laptop, with my middle-age eyes, they are definitely harder to tell apart at a quick glance than the plain ones....I saw the blurb in Beta notes but didn't realize the impact until I had to do a number of things in XY...

Hate to say it, but I now have to really look closely at icon to see the difference between a plus and minus...the gray makes it somewhat of a blurred square...I have noticed that when I look at screen from an angle, (more from the top instead of straight on), they become clearer but that makes using laptop much harder.

When the new look of an icon negatively affects usability, that may not be progress...only my opinion, but something to consider for those with aging vison!

j_c_hallgren wrote:I may be in the minority, but on my 1024x768 LCD laptop, with my middle-age eyes, they are definitely harder to tell apart at a quick glance than the plain ones....I saw the blurb in Beta notes but didn't realize the impact until I had to do a number of things in XY...

Hate to say it, but I now have to really look closely at icon to see the difference between a plus and minus...the gray makes it somewhat of a blurred square...I have noticed that when I look at screen from an angle, (more from the top instead of straight on), they become clearer but that makes using laptop much harder.

When the new look of an icon negatively affects usability, that may not be progress...only my opinion, but something to consider for those with aging vison!

Interesting! Since I am the master of my tree I can put anything you want as icon. Open for graphic suggestions...

Is it possible to have some way to select new icons or old plain vanilla ones? Even if it was at install time or externally, as that is one option that would be a 'set once and forget' thing...you know that I'm 99.98% satisfied with changes that are made...this unfortunately is in the other .02%!

BTW, the other way I had thought of describing new icons was "dust collected at bottom"...it's the gray to black +/- contrast (or lack thereof) that seems to be causing it...have no idea if another lighter color would help, thus requesting plain white originals as "old-timers vison edition"!

j_c_hallgren wrote:... "old-timers vison edition"!

I'm very open to that! In fact I already have plans for a Special Edition XYplorer and bought the domain sexyplorer.com for it! Of course I could as well do a SEniors' XYplorer!

Yes, of course I could make the icon choice configurable. I also thought of doing Mac-Style icons ( ) to attract some of those nerds...

sexyplorer? Sounds like a adult file manager...sexy-plorer!
That was how I truly read it at first...sorry!
se-xyplorer would have eliminated that possible interpretation...

admin wrote:Yes, of course I could make the icon choice configurable. I also thought of doing Mac-Style icons ( ) to attract some of those nerds...

There ya go! Let us drop our own collapsed/expanded icons in the XY\graphics directory (or something similar), then you could just load them at runtime, or if not present give us the default set.

/me goes off to play @ sexyplorer.com...

Well, if the style of the [+] [-] graphic is an important feature (I like it the way it is, hard coded) then it could show the ones from the currently applied windows theme if they are toggled on in XY's menu. Then every one is happy (if that's possible).

For the moment, since it's only these two itty-bitty icons, and likely storing both variants in EXE takes only a small nbr of bytes, I'd be content with having a toggle switch that can be set only via the INI...since I'd only need to set it once...other options may change more often, so having them in config is better, while I see this somewhat similar to or equivalent to a registry hack.

Just out of interest, isn't it self explanatory if the icon is a '+' or a '-' going by the sub-directories displayed in the tree? I.e. if there are subs, then it has been expanded and the icon therefore is a collapse (-), if there are no subs then it hasn't been clicked yet and the icon is an expand (+).

Another option would be to make the gradient a lighter shade of grey so the +/- stands out more.

Cheers,

D

CitizenD wrote:Just out of interest, isn't it self explanatory if the icon is a '+' or a '-' going by the sub-directories displayed in the tree?
Another option would be to make the gradient a lighter shade of grey so the +/- stands out more.

While I do agree that it's basically self-explanatory, having that gray there is also, for me, just a tiny bit too distracting...maybe having seen it the plain way for many years (since Windows 95) it's harder? You know the saying about "old dogs & new tricks"!

j_c_hallgren wrote:sexyplorer? Sounds like a adult file manager...sexy-plorer!
That was how I truly read it at first...sorry!
se-xyplorer would have eliminated that possible interpretation...

That lovely pun was intended, of course! And, sexy for me is sweet-little-attractive rather than XXX-adult.

In the next version I'll try something new, just for the fun of it: the "-" icon will have the shadow 180° turned so it will look (1) more different from "+", and (2) as if pressed down.

My 'ole eyes say: They like the new icons!! The lighter color and top shade on minus definitely help! Sometimes it just takes a very minor tweak to make things easier to see! THANKS!

Yes, those new plus/minus signs are really cool! Well done.

So now you can add them to Catalog aswell