We do that whole yearly survey, and I was looking for the percentages of dark theme vs light theme and couldn't find any info on it; thus I figured that it could be a question on the next survey. If there are other resources that give this information, that'd be great. Thanks!
Related
A previous question - Visual Studio 2010 element names for theming - has partially answered this, but not what I'm asking, so please don't forward me there.
First, I'm looking for the name of the tooltip background used in the theme editor (Color theme editor for visual studio 2019.)
Secondly, is there a more efficient method of finding these element names? I built this theme mostly by replacing known colors and then for unknowns, screen-shotting, paste to GIMP, get the HEX code search the xml file for the color, find the name, then return to the theme editor with the name and change the color.
The background color to the tooltip as you can see in the following image (outlined in red) is white, making the info generally unreadable. In the menu dialog mentioned in the referenced question, only the foreground color can be changed. The theme editor does not seem to have a field strictly for the tooltip background, so it is likely pulling this background from another unrelated field as visual studio tends to do.
To add to the confusion, in the above image is from a .cs file; on a .cshtml file, the tooltip looks like this. Evidently there are multiple tooltips, as there is also no syntax highlighting in the following example.
I realize this isn't strictly a coding question, but I still believe this to be the most appropriate place to ask the question - If I'm wrong, mods, please direct me to the proper place.
There is a color documentation made by microsoft (with screenshots). Maybe it could help you finding what you are looking for.
I'm using the Big Cartel NEAT theme and on the Product page, it has one main photo and the product info next to it.
Page: http://twicedrunk.bigcartel.com
Any secondary photos are displayed (HUGE) underneath and it looks ridiculous.
I'd like to set up a gallery type situation with one main photo and secondary photos underneath like eBay (and every other normal site for that matter!).
Any tricks?
I've googled and searched for an answer but can't find it anywhere.
I have very little programming knowledge.
Appreciate any help. :)
The Neat theme for Big Cartel now supports a small thumbnail gallery / click-to-open lightbox for product images. See here: http://neatdemo.bigcartel.com/product/lightbox-for-secondary-images
I'm still pretty green when it comes to Pharo so apologies in advance for what might well be a pretty dumb question. I've already done a perfunctory google search and checked out this stackoverflow entry which didn't have the answer I need. I'm looking for a ready-made color theme that has a black background. Understand, I'm not just looking to change the wallpaper background color, I want the all the windows, widgets, and window contents (workspace text in particular) to be appropriately modified as well. I'm assuming someone somewhere has already done this, I just don't know where to find it (I can't be the only one who codes at 3am and doesn't like staring at the giant light-bulb that is my monitor!).
Welcome to here, David :).
pharo is still young and fast growing and there are not many themes. So Esteban Lorenzano is working on a dark theme based on InteliJ IDEA, and you can find it here: http://smalltalkhub.com/#!/~estebanlm/Pharo3DarkTheme, but it will take a long time until it's done.
A few years ago I read an article about a neat way to analyze a large code-base.
The idea was to zoom out so far that patterns of indentation and block length are all that is really visible.
The author wrote about printing out code with very small fonts and looking at the results from 10 feet back. I believe the author also had some tools for reformatting code and producing images for this technique, in such a way that paper could be avoided.
I can't find the right search query to bring this up. Anyone have any ideas?
The text editor Sublime Text has a zoomed-out overview of your code on the left of the window, and can be used to scroll.
I've done this myself, that is print to paper with very small fonts and step back. If you want to avoid the paper route then perhaps you can print to PDF?
Or use and editor that can zoom in and out by changing font size. I use SciTE and Komodo Edit, both based on the Scintilla code editing engine and both allow me to hold down the ctrl key and use the mousewheel to change font size (just like web browsers).
With a bit of Google-fu I found references that this (ctrl+mousewheel) may also be implemented in Visual Studio and XCode. Can anyone confirm?
I think you are referring to Software Visualization? If you search for Code Visualizer, you maybe able to find a few products out there that does it but there are more focusing on aggregating the measurements information/metrics together for software comprehension and not necessary as a way to view or navigating to code only.
Some of the tools include Code city, code crawler or code visualizer. Michele Lanza and his team did some great work in this area in the recent years, however some only has support for certain language/platform so be mindful if they are going to be useful for you.
http://www.inf.usi.ch/faculty/lanza/
http://www.inf.usi.ch/phd/wettel/codecity.html
Could extract all the types, classes, etcetera, and put them into a tool such as graphviz and generate a graph.
Although I'm specifically interested in web application information, I would also be somewhat curious about desktop application development as well. This question is driven by my work on my personal website as well as my job, where I have developed a few features, but left it to others to integrate into the look and feel of the site.
Are there any guides or rules of thumb for things like color schemes, layouts, formatting, etc? I want to ensure readability and clarity for visitors, but not be bland and dull at the same time.
As for my knowledge in this area - If you hand me a picture, I have enough knowledge to reproduce it on the screen, but if you ask me to design a new interface or redesign an existing one, I wouldn't know where to begin.
Usually, each operating System has user Interface Guidelines. For Windows, have a look here. (Edit: The links in that post are broken. But a Search for "User Interface Guidelines" on MSDN has articles about everything)
Apple has it's own as well. Also, you may want to keep accessibility in mind.
One tip to check if your colors have good contrast is taking a snapshot of it and converting to grayscale. If you can't read something, colors were surely bad choosen.
Plus, although it's not about user interfaces, Before & After Magazine can give you some pretty good hints about color, design and related topics. It even has got some free pdf's to download.
The book Designing Interfaces, by Jenifer Tidwell has a entire chapter on the subject (Chapter 9, excerpts accesible online).
The entire book is worth recommending.
For web UI, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the most important color in web design is white, or "light". This is the color on top of which you place dense tracts of content.
Dark text, light background, always, when it comes to your primary content areas.
And the most important rule in layouting is whitespace. Let the content breathe.
Following these two simple rules is worth more than most "user interface usability" guidelines.
And by the way, the MS user interface guidelines are (by and large) horrible. Read Jakob Nielsen, look at Apple design aesthetics, but stay away from the MS "neutral gray/blue crunchbox" 12-step Wizard 10pt text philosophy of UI.
(And I say that as a long-time MS GUI programmer)
I'm horrible at finding colors that look good together, so I cheat and use pictures from nature that are mostly the color I want (say, green) and then I use this website to pull out the main color scheme. Generally nature does a pretty good job of setting its own nice color schemes.
Use high contrast color combos; Black text on white background is the best example of a high contrast combo.
A bad combo is green text on red background. It's horrible for color blind people (like myself).
See what your site looks like to a color blind person: colorfilter.wickline.org
As for desktop applications: Whatever you do, do not use hand-picked colors. Stick with the named system colors such as "Window Background", "Menu Text", etc. Otherwise, people relying on OS accessibility features will be locked with your color choices (unable to choose a high-contrast theme, for instance) and to people who like to customize their desktop themes will think your application is fugly.
Here are some simple pointers for usability in your typography. These things mainly address readability and accessibility concerns.
DOs:
Use relative font sizing (em)
Identify language changes within a document using the LANG attribute
Black text on a white background
For headings, use H1, H2, etc. and nest them appropriately
Chunk up content and organize with headings that fit what your users are looking for
Write clear and simple copy
Align left, ragged right
Text-to-background color must be high contrast
DONTs:
Use "click here" or "more" as link text
Use underline for emphasis
More than 2 font-type families
Italics
Blocks of text using all caps
Use true red or true blue text on white background (chromatic aberration)