Though lots of people have commented about the new EAGLE 7 icons in the
"betatest" news group, I just continue here, because this is the place
for my pet project: To ramble on about the EAGLE GUI...
First: It's quite nice that CadSoft saw the need to change icons.
From the design perspective, the new icons are much more
stylish and modern than previously.
Second: Unfortunately, the resulting VISIBILITY often renders the
new icons COMPLETELY useless - WORKING with the new ones is
rather difficult.
Let's go a bit more into the details - some of these points have already
been mentioned by other users, so I'll just add a bit of flavour and
some solutions:
1. CONTRAST:
Large icons contain lots of pixels and therefore lots of
information. This makes it possible to let the designer draw
nice-looking detailed graphics with lots of colours. SMALL
icons, on the other hand, do NOT have so many pixels, and
therefore should neither contain too many details nor colours,
but use a lot of CONTRAST to make them INSTANTLY recognisable.
2. A lot of icons in the control panel violate this CONTRAST rule:
- The 'used' dot (green or grey) uses a green that has the
SAME brightness as the grey one, and is only marginally
smaller. Therefore, I myself can NOT see on first glance
whether a library is in use or not. Since this is the only
point why the dot is displayed at all, I propose the
following: Make the grey dots lighter and smaller, and the
green dot greener and darker, like in the attached
image 'UsedDots.png' (left=current, right=proposed).
- The icons for BRD, SCH, SCR, text,... (everything that
appears in the 'Projects' tree) all look EXACTLY the same
to my eyes - since the green 'BRD' has the same brightness
as the surrounding grey rectangle, I cannot even see that
there IS text inside the rectangle (in order to see that
text I have to creep inside the screen). While previously
(with the old icons), it was EASILY possible to distinguish
the file types, now it's nearly impossible, because there
is NO colour contrast BETWEEN THE ICONS. I propose the
following: Use a mainly GREEN icon for boards, a mainly
RED one for schematics, and a mainly GREY one for
other file types (make it a LIGHT grey, so text inside
it might still be visible).
- For trees, it is rather important to see at first glance
where you ARE, because there might be LOTS of branches.
Unfortunately, EAGLE 7 sort of inverts this: OPENED
tree branches are grey and UNOPENED ones black, which is
EXACTLY the opposite of what is useful here. Proposal:
Make unopened branches grey, and opened ones black. The
same goes for libraries: Make the closed book grey (and
adjust the inner rectangle's colour, because its yellow
would otherwise have the same brightness as the
surrounding grey) and the opened book black.
- The icons for library contents suffer from useless
details (that are not decipherable, anyway), reducing the
contrast to nearly nothing. For small icons, REDUCE the
details.
- Additionally: The designer of the icons apparently drew
a LARGE image and afterwards reduced its size using
antialiasing WITHOUT further looking at the result.
Looking closely, one sees that the TOP input line is
THREE pixels wide, the BOTTOM one only TWO pixels, and
all the pins of the IC look different, which is
suboptimal. Drawing REALLY nice icons needs a CORRECTION
OF SINGLE PIXELS as last stage. I tried to do this in
the attached picture 'LibrarySymbols.png' (right side).
The resulting icons are MUCH easier to read than the
current ones.
- The above points are also valid for nearly ALL other
icons inside the tree...
3. For the editor windows, the designer tried to use stylish
grey scales for very small icons, which simply doesn't
work: I myself cannot extract any meaning out of the icons
for MOVE, DIMENSION, GATESWAP, ROTATE, etc., just because
a cannot see ANYTHING except a few undecipherable dots in
these icons - the contrast is MUCH TOO LOW. The solution
is rather easy (and was already proposed by other people):
MAKE THE ICONS LARGER! Time flies like an arrow, and screens
get larger and especially WIDER, so there's no problem in
using more screen space at left or right (it IS a problem
to waste screen space at the top or the bottom, as Microsoft
did with its infamous 'fluent' interface, which is anything
BUT). I propose the following: Use buttons with image sizes
of 48x32, and put THREE of them in a row. This makes LOTS
of things possible, and even users with lots of screen
pixels might still see things.
4. Additionally, visibly GROUPING these buttons with a heading
can make recognising their meaning even easier.
5. I wrote a small demonstration program for buttonbar design
years ago, but didn't post the results yet, because some
buttons still needed work, but, what the heck, here is a
screenshot in 'ButtonBar.png', which demonstrates:
- 48*32 pixel buttons, three in a row
- Headings
- Useful hints (the WIRE hint does NOT appear at the
shown position, but was pasted there, so that the other
images are still visible)
- The possibility of showing even HOW an object will be
drawn graphically by use of small 'click' circles and
construction lines (e.g., for the ARC command)
- The possibility of reducing the size of a group to
its heading by clicking on the heading
Since this image is not finished (and by all probability
never will), it also unintentionally demonstrates the
following problems:
- Headings are not easily readable. Either the grey
background should be lighter, or the text white.
- The images in 'Graphik' und 'Elektrik' were created 1:1
by drawing single pixels somewhere. Therefore, no
antialiasing was used, and the icons therefore look a
bit 'scratchy'. The images from 'ButtonPanel4' are
freely downloadable stock icons (the REDO is currently
shown disabled), only the undo/redo list was created
manually WITH antialiasing.
- The MIRROR icon doesn't fit in colourwise (should be
blue instead of green), and the two mirrored triangles
should be separated a bit more. I just used the
downloaded stuff here, without any changes.
- The gates in the INVOKE image are too small.
- The crosses in the NET image are not easily visible.
- The filled rectangle/polygon grey is a bit too dark.
- The DIMENSION image misses its third 'click' circle,
which should be on the dimensioning line.
But anyway - since this is just a demonstration, and I'm
not an icon designer, the problems might hopefully be
excused...
6. Such a button bar would be MUCH clearer and easier to use
than the current one, but consume much more space. For
large monitors, that might be OK, but for small window
sizes, that might be objectionable. This could be solved by
creating a button bar that can VANISH:
- By default, the button bar is visible and STAYS
visible.
- With an option, the automatic disappearance of the bar
can be switched on.
- Then, the button bar stays hidden by default, and only
when moving the mouse above the, say, 10 pixels at the
left of the window, the button bar IMMEDIATELY appears
(no timed appearance, please). This is especially easy
when working in full-screen mode (window maximised),
because hitting the left screen edge can REALLY be done
quickly.
- If the mouse leaves the button bar area, the button bar
IMMEDIATELY disappears.
- If the user clicks on a button, the button bar
IMMEDIATELY disappears (if it's not a click that opens
a local menu. In this case, the button bar vanishes
after a menu item was selected).
Andreas Weidner
