Animated triangles in inventory

I hate the animated triangles in the inventory.

I loathe all the cutesy animations in user interfaces.

My opinion varies. I think the new inventory arrows are fresh and easier to target with a mouse.

The animation doesn't occur until after you have already clicked on them .

Having a different shape and size is not the same thing as being animated.

The animation does not make them easier to target with a mouse.

Oh! I completely misunderstood your angle on that one.

I heartily agree, I get so tired of seeing all this fluff in the UI. It gets worse with every version, it accomplishes nothing, and it's a waste of resources. Could we please please PLEASE get an option to use the OS default UI for menus and windows? Pretty please?

Or the classic version of the OS default. I don't want anything garish and annoying like Windows XP comes by default.

How about standard Aqua? (but not Unified or (eccch) Metal)

Well, by OS default, I mean have SL use the standard OS APIs to render things, so SL would match your OS. If you run a Mac, it'll be Aqua. If you run Windows XP, it'll be Windows Classic or Luna depending on your preference for the whole OS (or something else, if you run a different skin). And if you run Linux...well...I don't know squat about Linux.

I'm amazed because I agree. These are really naff. Not because I dislike disclosure triangles, but because these look so cheap and badly designed they take down the quality of an already poor UI. Ironically, being a single triangle, they probably render a nanosecond quicker than the old style

The whole point of a disclosure button is to hilite to the user some action will happen when the mouse button is released over the triangle, and to give the user an opportunity to NOT do the action by moving the mouse away before releasing. LL's poor usage of a recognisable disclosure symbol fails the user and does not help.

I'm going to file this as a bug, I suggest if you feel strongly you should do the same.



mmm stick with the command line eh ? I totally disagree with you, when done properly there are plenty of UI enhancements that work very well indeed including many animated effects. Of course there are also many examples on all platforms that fail their purpose completely!

A good UI is one you don't realise you're using, if you've done a job and feel good about it, and not even realised you've done it, that's good UI, and it's an extremely rare jewel!

In general, SL's interface is typical of what happens when the meaning of "User" is not properly understood or given the priority it deserves.


(it may all be a moot point anyway with the advent of pressure sensitive multi touch screens on the horizon, in a few short years UI will undergo a revolution like no other )

The highlighting of the search term in the inventory display is so ugly to me that I filed a bug report about it before I realized what it was. I sincerely thought it was a technical problem, it would never occur to me that anyone would make a highlight color that was that ungodly ugly on purose.

The UI here is not only pretty bad from a usablity point of view it is also quite ugly in many places, and combines ugliness with unusabilty in a distintively annoying manner.

The blackish letters on very dark gray that appears in some dialog boxes - what is up with that? What were they thinking when they came up with that color scheme? What were they smoking, how much had they had to drink?

I didn't say, in any serious manner, that interfaces should return to command lines.

Cutesy things don't include interface elements like dialog boxes, drop down lists, and the like; those are functional.

Cutesy things are such things as an animated drum roll used to indicate a process that takes some time.

A better example of cutesy things is that miserable paper clip that Microsoft put in some programs. Aighh!!!!

If they need to make changes in the interface, here's an idea I think would do some good - give us the ability to set the font size in different interface elements independently. I could use a bigger font in the script editor, but I don't want to make other font's get bigger.

Suezanne, would you support my idea above about an option to have SL use the OS APIs for the interface? That would make it match the scheme of whatever you're using (I assume you, like I, run Windows with the Classic UI), and if it was an option in the Preferences, people could still have their fluff if they really wanted it. It shouldn't be that difficult to code, as hundreds of applications do it, and would probably be a drastic performance improvement (skinning is one of the worst ideas in programming history, in my opinion).

We need a workable proposal if we want this to be a reality

Linux doesn't have an OS look and feel. There's several toolkits that support theming, but apps using different toolkits have different themes.

I don't think SL could use the regular OS APIs for the UI without a big performance hit, for the same reason that full screen mode is more efficient than windowed. They'd have to duplicate the look and feel by hand, and that's just asking for trouble. You'd end up with one look-and-feel working well, and the rest being poor cousins... which was my point. If they're going to pick one native OS look and feel, which one do you think it'd be?

Lord, I just realized the highlighting applied to the search term where it occurs in the found items in the inventory list isn't a rectangle - it has rounded corners.

It looks terrible. TERRIBLE. It also makes it harder to read. Plus I would be perfectly content to have NO highlighting. If they wanted to do something useful they could make the folders where the items are found open up automatically in the texture selector.

Felix, I don't think there's much hope of getting an OS look to the interface. Certainly I would prefer a look more like XP Window's classic, but the interface doesn't use any normal interface element construction techniques, it is all custom written in OpenGL, or uses packages that are idiosycatic and time consuming to create.

I'd really like it if they would stop trying to round off the corners of every rectangular element in site, stop making things garish and bizarre on purpose, and perhaps try to give us some choices over at least some of the functionial aspects of the interfaces, such as being able to set the font size in various parts of the display separately and save our preferences so that we don't have to redefine them after each update.

I expect they will continure to make the interface uglier and less useable, wihile doing nothing to make it more accessible to people with normal old age vision deficits, or to make it more accessible to people with mobility and coordination problems that make normal use of the mouse and keyboard difficult.

For gosh sakes, you can't even use Alt F to open the file menu, why should anyone have any hope for a good interface when basic functionality like that is missing?