Message Boxes and their icons

The place to bring up any design issues, or post your own creations

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Phalanx
Posts: 360
Joined: Sun Dec 19, 2004 12:42 am
Location: Australia

Post by Phalanx »

Switchboy wrote:ReactOS is supposed to be an opensource windows. It is supposed to atract windows users.

In that case it has to behave, look and feel like windows too. Maybe with an adjustment here and there
I find those ones much less attractive than the windows ones. If it just the same, I would not change just for the risk either.
QD
Posts: 15
Joined: Sat Mar 22, 2008 10:31 pm
Location: Russia

Post by QD »

Exact copying, eh ... Then tell me, what's the use of offering a minimize and maximize buttons on an error message? Or any other of these. Thats the way you're copying old errors too. Your cool, colorful, fat icon wont save it. Not mentioning mostly all ignored some major typography principles. Didn't want to hurt your feelings, but this "new windows os" can appear even worse and raw looking than MS because of such tiny things.

Sorry :|
Switchboy
Posts: 97
Joined: Mon Oct 03, 2005 9:29 am

Post by Switchboy »

Those boxes i made where only an example to show that the boxes should be smal. Instead of the hughe boxes shown sofar in this thread.
Also the icon is more of an indication of whats going on. It shouldn't have to be larger then 32*32. That's more then big enough. The colours also look a bit dull. I think that icons that are going to be used so many times should be simple and have hard colours.

This will bring the time you need to recognise the icon down. Icons are there to help.
and
Please note they only serve as an example to make my point. In no way am I proposing designs here.

They are small, neat and above all: functional.
Phalanx
Posts: 360
Joined: Sun Dec 19, 2004 12:42 am
Location: Australia

Post by Phalanx »

You really should look at ergonomics. The ones by Ensign Joe fall into many principles, however your ones fail many ideas (grouping, alignment, white spaces, sizing). Sure EJs are not perfect, but they are good starts. You will notice Vista also has improved on these idea, esp in things like the copy file dialogs.
etko
Posts: 154
Joined: Thu May 26, 2005 3:43 am
Location: Slovakia
Contact:

Post by etko »

Rather than inventing new shitty icons I would investigate idea of color coding for windows caption for Windows XP classic with ability to be able to change the color in desk.cpl theme editor.

Like error message box with red caption, warning with yellow etc. If the icons major colors could be in sync with caption maybe it would improve readability. Having colored buttons on taskbar for message boxes would be cool too. This way you would spot red error button instantly. Having ability to flash in such color would be even more convenient.
SdC
Posts: 190
Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2008 3:52 pm
Location: GMT +1

Post by SdC »

etko wrote:Rather than inventing new shitty icons I would investigate idea of color coding for windows caption for Windows XP classic with ability to be able to change the color in desk.cpl theme editor.

Like error message box with red caption, warning with yellow etc. If the icons major colors could be in sync with caption maybe it would improve readability. Having colored buttons on taskbar for message boxes would be cool too. This way you would spot red error button instantly. Having ability to flash in such color would be even more convenient.
Sorry I wouldn't like to have a desktop that looks like a Japanese shopping mall... maybe for dyslexic people it would be useful, as an Accessability Option.
etko
Posts: 154
Joined: Thu May 26, 2005 3:43 am
Location: Slovakia
Contact:

Post by etko »

Yeah maybe bad idea, but since I use two monitors sometimes, I had really problem to locate active window/dialog after some additional paper documentation reading. It was worst when some modal popup appeared stealing focus. Setting caption color to red mitigates this problem on bluish desktop quite easily. Problem is that menus and all the other widgets get red too.
Ensign Joe
Posts: 9
Joined: Wed Feb 06, 2008 5:36 pm

Post by Ensign Joe »

Would be nice to darken the window that caused the error message or that is blocked by the modal window like the UAC does (but not the whole desktop, please ;) )

In early Windows Whistler releases with Watercolor you had this, that the dialog that is blocked by a modal dialog is getting a red title bar or so
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