Re: metallized interface (offtopic rant)

FROM : Steven Majewski
DATE : Sat Nov 02 18:10:16 2002

On Friday, November 1, 2002, at 05:35  AM, Simon Stapleton wrote:

> By the way, don't even get me onto 'skinning', and the sort of mad
> concoctions that get thrown out by clueless users with a cracked copy of
> photoshop and too much time on their hands.  Go look at the Audion skins
> section (or, frankly, the default skin that comes with Audion) for a
> reason apps shouldn't be skinnable.  I downloaded Audion, said "Ugh!",
> searched the skins a bit, said "Eeeeagh!", then deleted the whole damn lot.

I'm not wild about skins either, but Mozilla's themes, on the other hand,
are great. I was able to find a minimal icon theme ("Pinball" - I think.)
that doesn't take up a lot of screen real estate, so I don't have to keep
hiding the buttons to get a reasonable amount of text on my iBook screen.

Mail only gives a choice of text/icons/text+icons, and if you choose text
only, you loose some of the functionality. ( You loose the search bar! )

Someone might suggest better design with smaller icons in the first place
as a solution, but smaller icon's are more "iconic", so it makes sense for
them to be a 'power user' feature.

I was sorry to see Apple's Appearance themes go.

The good idea there was to have some global appearance settings that
each app could use. I always find myself having to set a bunch of
preferences for a bunch of different apps where it would make more
sense for it to be a global setting.  For example, because of my
poor reading vision, I'm always increasing the default font size for
almost every app I run, and then, if possible, trying to do something
else (like change the icon/button bar) to get more of the window
real estate devoted to the text content.

I guess Apple was reacting to the 'ugly skins' aspect of themes and
forgot that they actually solved a user-interface problem.

-- Steve Majewski
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