Re: [Pan-users] About colors of read and watched messages...

[Bobby D. Bryant]

On 2002.12.12 17:27:19 -0600 Maurizio Colucci wrote:

> On Friday 13 December 2002 00:01, Bobby D. Bryant wrote:

> > I think a nice intuitive solution would be to use a light - medium -
> > dark color scheme for read - unread - new, and just use different
> > color schemes for the watched and unwatched variants of that
> > typology.
>
> I'm against. :-P
> In my opinion, more than two colors are unintuitive.

Not if the usage is systematic.  See below.


> Furthermore, we are assigning the same kind of identification (color)
> to different concepts (watched and read)...

Actually there are two orthogonal components of the typology:

The first is "watched" vs. "not watched".

The second is "read" vs. "unread" vs. "new", i.e. how much previous 
attention the article has received.

The current system uses a color scheme to differentiate between watched 
and not-watched; I suggest continuing that.

The current system also uses a color or value (darkness) or font 
(boldness) scheme to differentiate between "read" vs. "unread" vs. 
"new", and I also suggest continuing that.

The only thing novel about my suggestion is making the two systems 
completely orthogonal in the implementation, as they are in the 
typology.  Light-medium-dark for color 1 in unwatched threads and for 
color 2 in watched threads.

In fact the boldness for "new" is already orthogonal to watched vs. 
unwatched, so five of the six cells in the typology are already coded 
consistently.  All that's needed is to bring the sixth one on board.

Optionally let users specify their own color scheme for each category, 
but the above would make a good intuitive default because you would 
only have to learn two concepts rather than six different colors.  It 
would also let you keep your eyes on the subject lines as you skimmed 
rather than having to continually glance off to the left to see what a 
thread's status is.

A certain amount of customizability will be necessary due to people's 
choice of GTK+ themes, but you could probably manage the 
customizability with just a few parameters.  I.e., a base color 'theme' 
selector for each of "watched" and "not-watched", plus parameters for 
the lightness/darkness differences in case people are using GTK+ themes 
with light fonts on dark backgrounds.

Later, if you want to get fancy and allow people to mark threads for 
additional reasons all you would have to do is add support fore more 
color 'themes', i.e. a "default" color, a "watched-reason-1" color, a 
"watched-reason-2" color, etc. for however many categories you wanted 
to support.  (I would find that very useful in some of the busy, 
eclectic newsgroups that I read, though I would hardly categorize it as 
an urgent feature request.)

Bobby Bryant
Austin, Texas