[Bf-funboard] Icons for VSE

[Campbell Barton]

Think changing the color is not really helping things - (or the
improvement is so small its splitting hairs).

The reason changing color to make it more obvious its different is bad
IMHO is that an exceptionally different color (like bright red or
yellow) - should be used for an exceptional case - something that
should never happen or that will cause failure.

The other day for eg, I noticed that you could have a
sequence/mask/movie clip sequencer strip that looses its reference to
its original data (a scene strip pointing to a NULL scene), This case
is exceptional so I made it draw with bright red striped overlay.
The same thing could be done fir strips that point to missing files for eg.

So IMHO drawing special attention to a regular use case is not a good
use of color.

Just draw the waveform in all cases and uses will get the idea.

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 5:06 PM, Bassam Kurdali <bassam at urchn.org> wrote:
> Changing the color to be a bit more different sounds fine; though I
> don't have trouble distinguishing the green from the blue. Campbell's
> suggestion with the waveform display sounds like the best way (seeing
> the waveforms is also very important for editing) and does not add
> excessive noise to the sequence editor.
>
> The problem with all the icons and tooltips is that they distinguish
> very simple distinctions; once you learn them (which probably takes a
> few seconds) they instantly will become an irritation. I'd rather
> reserve tricks like that for something that is truly complicated- if we
> clutter up with icons for simple things, we would end up drowning in
> them before we can use them for something truly difficult.
>
> TL;DR Icons are too visually noisy, changing color sounds OK, +1
> Campbell's suggestion of showing the waveform without having to
> ram-cache the sounds.
>
>
> On Tue, 2012-08-28 at 10:32 +0200, Bol Bib wrote:
>> perhaps. But everything has to be learned,colors and Icons. If I know sound is yellow,I will learn that. But right now sound and movie are quite similar,so ,imo,it can get quite confusing on that alone.
>>
>>
>> another option is maybe a tooltip that shows what's under your cursor.
>> It could contain an icon followed by the name of the item?
>>
>>
>>
>> > Date: Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:04:37 +0200
>> > From: magick.crow at gmail.com
>> > To: bf-funboard at blender.org
>> > Subject: Re: [Bf-funboard] Icons for VSE
>> >
>> > On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Bol Bib <bollebib at hotmail.com> wrote:
>> > >
>> > > on the readability problem
>> > >
>> > > Maybe you could just go into the Ui settings (theme) and change the colors of the sound (or movie) to better differentiate the 2? Just make it yellow ,or something and it should stand out very much.
>> > >
>> > >
>> > > Maybe the default could be changed for new users of the sequencer?
>> >
>> > I kind of like the colors. The problem is that you don't know what
>> > they mean when you first look at it. This leads to it looking
>> > confusing and that is never good. But in Barton's example there is so
>> > much info that you get overloaded and adding icons could just lead to
>> > more overload. The classic design answer would be to find a better way
>> > to group things but I don't know how that would work. I still like the
>> > idea of having icons. Perhaps they would only show up on zoomed in
>> > views.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Douglas E Knapp
>> >
>> > Creative Commons Film Group, Helping people make open source movies
>> > with open source software!
>> > http://douglas.bespin.org/CommonsFilmGroup/phpBB3/index.php
>> >
>> > Massage in Gelsenkirchen-Buer:
>> > http://douglas.bespin.org/tcm/ztab1.htm
>> > Please link to me and trade links with me!
>> >
>> > Open Source Sci-Fi mmoRPG Game project.
>> > http://sf-journey-creations.wikispot.org/Front_Page
>> > http://code.google.com/p/perspectiveproject/
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > Bf-funboard mailing list
>> > Bf-funboard at blender.org
>> > http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bf-funboard mailing list
>> Bf-funboard at blender.org
>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-funboard mailing list
> Bf-funboard at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-funboard



-- 
- Campbell