Window background colours

I was offline all day yesterday. Today I will get stuck into Puppy development.

While driving yesterday, I was thinking that there is something that I might not have posted about anywhere. Puppy users will have noticed that some of the popup windows that I have created for Puppy have a background colour (that's "color" if you are in the USA!).

Most recently, the shutdownconfig GUI windows, that 01micko has put into beta4 of Slacko, has bright yellow windows (note, I have now changed those to pale yellow, see the zz_shutdownconfig-20110924.pet, also see L18L's internationalized zz_shutdownconfig-20110925.pet -- I will post about that separately soon).

I originally conceived that background colour for windows could be a defacto feature, or convention, for Puppy. Regardless of themes, these colours could be standardized, so always convey the same information to the viewer. I envisaged the colours to be:

Yellow: next-step
Violet: announcement
Green: success, completion
Pink: warning
Red: error
Orange: pending, in-progress
Blue: information

However, the primal red, green and blue are a bit dark, and lighter shades are probably better. For shutdownconfig, instead of yellow and orange, I am now using #FFFF80 and #FFDC32.

Popup GUI dialog applications that allow the background colour to be set are 'gtkdialog', 'yaf-splash' (both the new and old versions), 'xmessage' and my new 'pupdialog'. No for Xdialog and gxmessage. I don't know about 'yad'.

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Comments

TBH & IMHO...
Username: dawg
Barry, I'm very sorry, but those colourful plaintexty message windows look kitschy and lame. Something more stylish or, shall we say, consistent with the "general" GUI theme would look much better ("tidier"), and hence also leave a better general impression and feel about the otherwise rather good OS.

Re standardized colours
Username: BarryK
"That idea of the standardized colours goes right back to the early days of Puppy. The same colours are used for text at bootup, for example "done" in green. Perhaps it could be made configurable by the Puppy distro builder. Choose to use them, or the default window background only.

colours
Username: L18L
"May i suggest Making the colours variables and put them in for example /etc/rc.d/functions4puppy COL_PINK="\Z???" This will also make translations easier PINK instead of \\Z??? would allow everyone using other colours even translators coluld choose other colours, if necessary, easily.. As for the colour/color issue: A language file for en_US containing [b]just[/b] the phrases containing English colour translated to color would satisfy purists of American language. Imaginary Example msgid "Choose the colour you like to see" msgstr "Choose the color you like to see" There might exist other words then colour which this could be applied on. (spell checking is American here :cool:)

Tags: puppy