Conference bulova::decw_jan-89_to_nov-90

    I'll be the first.  And I'll try to be kind, but it's going to be
    difficult.  I have a color GPX workstation, and I found the default
    color scheme to be unusable.  The dark gray and darker gray for the
    icons and window decorations combined with black foreground make for
    an eye-straining low-contract situation.  I can't even see the
    buttons on the windows without putting my nose to the screen.  And
    unlike the window foreground and background colors which I can
    change (though I'm still having trouble getting windows to look
    right, I'm not sure why), there seems to be no obvious way to
    set the colors of the borders and icons.
    
    In addition, the difference between shades of gray to indicate
    input focus is almost undetectable.  It took me hours before I
    even noticed there WAS a difference.
    
    Why can't the default color scheme be colorful?  Or at least high
    contrast!  And how do I get the colors so that I can read the icons
    and make out the buttons?
    
    The gray defaults for the window backgrounds are also an unfortunate
    choice.  Yes, it all looks very elegant and snazzy until you try
    to use it.  It's as if someone replaced your 100-watt reading lamp
    with a night-light.
    
    					Steve

    I'll be second...
    
    I have a monochrome VSII (non-GPX). So strictly speaking, this does not
    apply to color systems...
    
    I have tried many of the window managers which have floated around over
    the last several years for VMS. When I finally put up Motif V1.1 FT, I
    was very disappointed because the out-of-the-box "coloring" was
    virtually unusable for me. In general, I felt the screen had become
    "muddy".
    
    Imagine my surprise when I began using DECwindows V3 (WC baselevel) and
    discovered that the old crisp, well defined looking screen had
    returned. I believe the monochrome settings are *very* good, and
    congratulate any and all responsible for a job well done!

    Colour is really a matter of preference, but I'll agree with Steve
    Lionel that high contrast is the order of the day. I'm currently
    thinking of reverting to my last idea, Yellow foreground and Cornflower
    Blue background, but others may well differ.
    
    Don't forget stuff like borderwidths are really awful when too thick.
    The defaults seem to me to be much too thick. My settings are posted
    elsewhere in this conference.
    
    
    /andy/

Hi,
  I think that it might be a nice feature to have some OOTB color schemes.
Microsoft Windows does this.  You can select a color scheme you like from a
list, or create your own.

  Another note is that the current color scheme uses up too many colors to be
usable on a (uggh) 4-plane system.  A 4-plane system only has 16 colors 
available at a time, and V3 was eating a large amount of them.

  Also, why not use named colors?  That would make customizing somewhat easier.


Just my .03

Jeff

re: .4

Bravo, Jeff.

When I read the base note, the idea of OOTB color schemes was
my first thought.  With all the nice "realistic" shading that
Motif can do, it's very hard to customize the colors and have them
still look "realistic" in terms of shading.  With OOTB color 
selections, I could leave color set selection up to someone
more artistically inclined than myself and have a great looking
screen.
	As far as named colors are concerned, that seems like a
good idea, but would they offer sufficent flexibility?  I'd
like to see a menu that shows multiple color schemes (in actual
use on sample widgets as you select them) and a color mix widget
to create your own schemes.
	The thing that surprised me the most about the colors was
that they are entirely different colors depending on the tube you've
got.  What's grey on my VR290 is brown on a Sony tube!  Whoever
selects colors ought to see both because they're not the same!

What can I say, this one was worth only $.02!

    Colours should be consistent across all tubes, in an ideal world. Just
    a case of adjustment being needed?
    
    
    /andy/

>>    Colours should be consistent across all tubes, in an ideal world. Just
>>    a case of adjustment being needed?
    
Yup, you're right, the should be the same, but they're not.  I don't think that
any amount of adjustment would make a VR290 as good as the new Sony monitors either.
The reason I say this is that I find a consistent difference between VR290s and
Sonys (I don't know what we call them, VR297 maybe??).   I guess they're just like
TVs, some show colors better than others.  And I'm going to keep myself from
getting into comparing sharpness, otherwise I'll start hating what I have on my
desk!!  ;-)

Rob

I have a 3200 with ssb5.4 and decw V3.
I am unable to customize my colors because I get a warning that the color map is
full! 

I have tryed all of the decw$mwm*.dat files with no applications started/running
and always get the warning. 

Can I stop/get_around this so I can adjust the gray shades?

Paul H.

	Most likely, you've got a 4-plane VS3200, that seems to be
a popular configuration for the 3200 because of its limited backplane
space.  Your colormap size depends upon the number of bit planes that 
you have for the graphics processor.  For example, if you have a 4 plane
machine, you can have 2^4 (16) colors.  If you have an eight plane
machine (the most common color configuration probably), you have
2^8 colors, or 256.  Motif is sort of a color hog as compared to XUI
because motif does shading and is supposed to look "prettier", and 16
colors is cramped space even for XUI.

Rob

If you have 4 planes the default way of doing things can cause a problem as
described in .9.  Instead of topShadowColor and bottomShadowColor, you probably
want to you topShadowPixmap and bottomShadowPixmap.  The available values for
these in mwm are described in the mwm guide.

Dick

I just put up DECwindows V3 on my 8-plane color VAXstation-II/GPX and I was
very pleased with the color scheme that came up "out-of-the box".  I ended
up with a pleasing and very readable set of shades of brown for everything.
I did not have the problems others have reported with gray colors.  Since
I had customized my screen background under DW V2 to be a dark brown, I
presume that by default Motif is using the session manager's screen background
color as a base and calculating the border and icon colors, etc. from that.

In any event, I have no complaints on that score.  It's a BIG improvement over
the out-of-the-box behavior of hpwm way back when.  Hpwm and the hp toolkit
chose atrocious colors and shadings that completely hid the 3-D effect.  You
absolutely had to change them to get anything usable.  Motif has fixed that
problem up nicely.

--PSW

   I also notice that the ability to just specify the background color and let
   all the others default to something suitable has been added and works rather
   nicely. I generally find that the generated foreground color is usually white
   and doesn't always provide the best contrast, but I zap it to something dark
   and things are pretty good overall. The generated shadow colors are usaully
   excellent for providing the 3-D appearance.

-mike

Hmm - my screen background is a blue color, and I get dark gray icons
with black text, not readable, hence my complaint.  It depends on your
background setup?

				Steve

    This is my first chance to look into this note after a few days, glad
    to see all the responses, color is a hot topic!  I hear you and thanks to 
    those who have answered some of the questions already, exactly how I would
    have said it too 8^).
    
    Yours are exactly the type of responses I'm looking for, please continue
    to tell me what type of monitor you are working on and what colors you
    get verses what you prefer to work with.  I can make some adjustments
    even out the color differences between monitor types, but if your contrast
    and brightness has been turned way up or down, sorry Charlie, can't help 
    you in that dept.
    
    Now for some insights.  The intended colors were done on a VAXstation
    3100 8 plane system with a Sony Trinitron monitor.  Of course that is
    the best of possible worlds and doesn't reflect the majority of equip,
    I figured I'd start with the truest color representation and work my
    way down 8^).  The colors are supposed to look like:
    		screen background = slate blue
    		window interior	= neutral beige to match hardware plastics
    		window border = warm brown to discern input focus
    
    I can't affect the icon colors, they are controlled by the application 
    you are running.  We decided to try warm, neutral colors to
    give the screen objects more of a 3D look to blend in with our hardware
    shells, and remember,different applications will make the window
    interiors different colors, so we had to choose a border color that
    won't clash with most colors chosen.  But enough of our reasoning, I
    want to hear what most of YOU want!  What were some of your favorite
    color combinations to work with in XUI?
    
    Linda 
      

Linda,

I have a VS3100/GPX with a VR299 monitor.  I don't understand your comment about
not being able to affect the icon colors - certainly I didn't specify dark
gray with black text!  This combination was also used for buttons, window
titles, etc.  The window background was a lighter gray with black text.
Where did these come from if you specified brown?

			Steve

	Well I'll add my .02 cents worth too.

	My mother (an Art teacher) always pushed the KISS philosophy to her
students. And I think this would apply in this case. 
	I have created a color scheme for my VS2000 GPX that only uses 7 colors
and I think it presents a reasonable display. I used basicly the grays with a
brighter color for Highlights. 
	I am not really condoning my color choices but trying to say that a
good display can be made with fewer colors than what is currently in the
defaults. The key here is to define your color scheme first and stick to it
while defineing each object for display. 
	I personally prefer the bland background and the brightly highlighted
window of focus. This helps me focus on what I'm doing in that window.
	Having a collection of samples setup could be nice. 

KISS = Keep It Simple Stupid

As was stated in an earlier note, to use fewer colors you can use the pixmap
resources.  Set the same color for background, top and bottom shadow, and
then for instance use 25_foreground for top shadow pixmap and 75_foreground
for bottom shadow.  This partially depends on if you have a lighter foreground
than background or vice versa.  This is possible in the window manager.
A bug in the toolkit kept us from having this as part of the window customization
in the session manager, but I've been told this has been fixed, so hopefully
it will be put back in the session manager for EFT.  If you bring up the 
color mix widget for the window background, there's a popup showing the 
pixmap choices we used.  These are stored in the data files, but not used 
because of the bug.  With this setup, motif should use very few more colors
than XUI.

re: 10
I do have a 4 plane 3200 and I loaded the decw$mwm_bw.dat as default with no
other apps or color settings and I still got a color map full warning?

Who does it?

Paul H.

I found out that the "shades of gray" color scheme I had been seeing was
a result of having previously installed the Motif developer's toolkit.  Sorry
about that.

But when I saw what the real default colors were, I wasn't any happier.  They're
various shades of dingy green-brown, and only slightly better contrast than
the gray scheme.

I believe that the default background should be white or as close to it as
one can get, and the default foreground should be black.  Icon and window
decorations could be blue-gray with white letters and some lighter color
shading.  The highlight colors should be contrasting so as to be readily
noticable.

			Steve

First, Thanks for asking!

I've noticed the conspicuous lack of comment from support people 
throughout all these mwm/resource discussions, and my appprehension is 
slowly turning into terror!

I support DW programmiing and will not be directly responsible for mwm 
when it shipped so I asked the group that does support the WM what 
they thought of it and nobody has even had time to bring it up.  They
suggested I go ahead and speak on their behalf. 

Without DRASTIC improvement in the defaults, the CSC's will be buried 
in irate customers when this thing ships.  Unhappy customers aren't 
exactly a boon for the rest of the Corporation, either.

The first guiding principle about customers is that they want 
everything to stay the same (while getting better and cheaper, of 
course).  The second is that VMS people expect everything to be 
intuitively simple and not have to read manuals.

What this means is that we need to put aside personal prejudices about 
all the snazzy new mwm features and first come up with a set of 
defaults that most closely duplicate XUI and apologize like mad for 
the things that can't be done.

First, of course, is having the icon box by default.  If Steve Lionel 
can't see how to get one where does that leave customers??

Second, once you have the box, the icons are so grotesque you don't 
have room for enough.  There should be an option to have only labels 
with something like:
Mwm*iconDecoration:     label
Mwm*iconImageMaximum:   100x1
Mwm*iconImageMinimum:   100x1
so that people who have more than a few concurrent applications can 
have a box that doesn't dominate their screen and still be able to 
read the labels.

Third, make the fix for compose the default.  99% of our customers 
won't be using keyboard traversal and compose is far more important.

Fourth, on colors.  Colors are a very personal thing and no matter how 
good some of us think they look or are justified, the customers will 
want to change them.  Use as few as possible and use named colors that 
are easily recognizable as possible (red, not sienna or orchid).  That 
way, even if they don't read the documentation they'll know which 
color corresponds to what they want to change on their screen.  Highly 
refined numbers will only make them hate us because it makes them feel 
stupid to not understand how to use them.

Having a couple of different color schemes would also be a good idea.  
Others that uses more colors in a subtle fashion, a "mod" look, some to 
blend with different standard office colors, etc.

There is probably other ideas, but these are the main ones I can think 
of.  Remember that the vast majority of customers want continuity.  
Let the hackers and the cognscenti read the manuals and do the fancy 
stuff.  Last month we took 1,264 customer calls on DW.  We can't 
handle the kind of volume that a mismatched mwm would generate.

Bruce

    
    Like many people have said already colors are a matter of personal
    taste.

    I agree with the previous reply that using named colors wherever
    possible is a good idea, but in my opinion the named colors leave
    a lot to be desired.

    I would like to see a color mixing widget that displays the 12 digit hex
    number. I have writen a color mixer program that displays the number,
    and I use it to get the number for my decw$mwm.dat file.

    I like the idea of the MRE program, but I would like to suggest an MRE
    program a that shows a blow up of a window, icon, root menu etc, where
    clicking on a component (like shadow, matte etc.) would bring up a color
    mixer to set that component.  Then all of the values could be written to
    the .dat file.  I think something like this should be part of decwindows
    just as the customize is now.

    Bob

    
    I would also like to see the capability for transparency.
    Shadowing should be available for the pointer or windows appear on top
                                      of others.
    
    
    Chris

Re: .20

Bruce, if you are terrified then please submit a QAR.  The people who are
in a position to fix this may not be following this conference.

				-- Bob

    Also escalate your concerns through the DECWindows CSSE folks.
    
    Thanks,
    
    /andy/

For those of you who are upset over the difficulty in customizing resources
in the window manager:

Work is now going on to replicate all capabilities in the window manager
resource file into customize dialog boxes accessible via the root window.
It was never our intent to force users to edit the DECW$MWM.DAT.  This
was a short-term solution for IFT only.  We are also taking all input
regarding defaults (in this and other notes).

				steve

                          A P P L A U S E ! ! !

Please consider the "reverse video" situation.  Some users want to be able
to switch between "black on white" text and "white on black" text in
windows.  Other resources must follow as appropriate.