E4/CSS/Visual Design

This page summarizes the investigations into an updated visual design (default stylesheet) for the e4 workbench.

Goals

The goals of this work are:

• design a compelling visual style for e4
  • reduce visual noise, focus on the data
  • investigate additional breathing space, lessons learned from publishing and web
  • sleek/modern
• drive the ability/flexibility of the CSS styling for SWT widgets
• demonstrate the ability to keep a "classic" look and supply alternate designs

Visual Design Items

This is currently just a list of ideas (not prioritized or committed).

• tabs
  • ability to define custom shapes
  • custom highlight colors and gradients for tabs
  • ability to express a background color for area behind tabs (ie, blank space on right)
  • custom fonts/bolding for selection
  • ability to remove keylines or specify their color independently
    • remove or color top border without removing tab tops
    • remove, color, or set position of the bottom tab line
• reducing key lines between tabs and their content, and within the content
  • ability to style separately the color/presence of borders on widgets (per side)
• view and editor toolbars
  • consider a local editor toolbar (appears in location of current breadcrumb bar)
  • appearance of local view toolbars in consistent location below
  • appearance/location of min/max view controls
• view/editor visuals
  • visual separation of view stacks without using keylines (coloring?)
  • visual distinction of editor area
• perspective switcher
• status area
• toolbar with customizable background/transparency
• ability to specify an image as a workbench background
• reduce visual clutter - no need to decorate for the 90% case

Interaction Design Items

• Activity based layouts vs. perspectives
• "Split editor" interactions
  • Today creating a split is same feedback as stack manipulation but it's a different thing
  • Toolbar icons for managing split/unsplit (might be useful in "compare" also)

Implementation issues/constraints

• menubar is native
• we must assume view/editor content is limited in ability to style
  • selection colors are native
  • table headings are native
• CTabFolder/ETabFolder
  • limited ability to specify shapes in current implementation (anti-aliasing/blending issues)
  • ownerdraw model would require Java code to manage custom tab shapes
  • can we style it by supplying bitmaps for corners and top/bottom, stretch to fit text content
• Programmatic simplication? (revisiting individual items is costly)
  • diminish icons when views lose focus
  • compute decorator 90% case and show the exceptions instead
  • subtle fades of non-active views