Inconsistent color schemes for city and finance stats

[Spike]

Different color sets are used for the statistics in the city and the finance dialog. I suggest to pick the best readable colors, and use them for both dialogs.

[isidoro]

You are unstoppable (in the good sense)...  I wish I had half your energy...  Where do you get it from?

[Spike]

I don't know. I'm a very restless person, and it often makes unhappy. So be happy if you have more inner peace and can enjoy lazy times

[prissi]

The city dialog has those colors by design: passengers, mail and goods have the same hue for produced and transported. The other colors are choosen for good contrast. Also city window and finance window has no similar entries, why should the colors be the same.

If you do not like colors, you are free to offer constructive critics. Otherwise please mind, that this is personal opinion.

[isidoro]

In the beginning I didn't understand Hajo's tip.  Why should be the same if the buttons refer to different things?

Then I understood that he meant that the overall appearance is not consistent.  The palette chosen for buttons in both dialogs is very different.  The dialogs seem to belong to different games for the color appearance...

Keeping all that consistent and to the liking of everyone is difficult.  Why not make those button colors pak-configurable?

[Spike]

It's also that TurfIt denied a request for changing vertical spacing with the argument that consistency is important.

But there are a lot of inconsistencies still. I had the hope that if one developer believes in importance of consistency for UI's, it would be a good idea to show some more of them.

Layout - > Finances have good margins left and bottom of the dialog, city statistic buttons sit very close to the left and lower border. There are dialogs which require the player to see some of the map, e.g. schedule dialogs, so those need to be small, otherwise they obstruct the players work with the map. But statistics can havbe genrous margins, since one works with the dialog while it is open, and not the map. And the magins help the eye, I think, a more relaxed layout, too.

[prissi]

All list windows have the same design, four buttons in a row. Same for convoi info, factory info and so on. Thus is is very consistent.

Personally, I do not like larger than neccessary dialoges. One can resize almost any of them, thus people likeing larger dialoges could use them. At least that is my current philosophy for the UI.

[Spike]

I think we have different ideas what the word consistency means. We have here two dialogs which show statistics. The one has a relaxed layout, the other one a cramped layout. So why do you say you prefer cramped layout, if the other window already has a relaxed layout? It's a personal opinion, but nowhere near a consistent attribute of the dialogs. Schedule e.g. is super-cramped, and sound is very relaxed. I can list more if needed.

Thus is is very consistent.

To quote Mr. Fischer: "I'm not convinced".

What I did is to annotate the two dialogs where I see inconsistencies. Maybe it makes more clear what I mean when I say "inconsistent UI".

Edit:

The city window does not even have a consistent left margin. The text about the city is more right than the buttons below the stats frame. I'd suggest to add at least so much left margin to the buttons that they are in-line with the text, and add about the same amount of margin below the buttons.

Edit 2:

Personally, I do not like larger than neccessary dialoges. One can resize almost any of them, thus people likeing larger dialoges could use them. At least that is my current philosophy for the UI.

As we can see from the screenshot, the finance window has a fixed size. (This is again not consistent with the city window which can be resized)

Edit 3: My philosophy is to use space if it helps to make dialogs easier to read, and if there are no reasons why the extra space is bad - e.g. because the dialog hides something that is important, while a smaller dialog would still let the player see. But in case of statistics windows, I doubt that the player wants to see much else in the moment when they open the dialogs. They want to access the stats data.

Edit 4: "This Year:" and "Last Year:" are capitalized and got a colon at the end, each, but "This month" has a lower case "month" and no colon. Also the numbers in the finance window have a bigger line spacing than the text in the city window. Consistency?

[TurfIt]

But there are a lot of inconsistencies still.

Indeed there are. I did quite a few commits last year relating to UI tweaks, but there's seemingly always another dialog needing attention...
Also, creating 'pixel pushing' type patches is quite tedious; Ones enthusiasm for firing up the compiler wanes quite rapidly when doing so. Hence I consider it a multi-year project to clean things up...

Layout - > Finances have good margins left and bottom of the dialog, city statistic buttons sit very close to the left and lower border. There are dialogs which require the player to see some of the map, e.g. schedule dialogs, so those need to be small, otherwise they obstruct the players work with the map. But statistics can havbe genrous margins, since one works with the dialog while it is open, and not the map. And the magins help the eye, I think, a more relaxed layout, too.

Here I have to disagree again. IMHO the finances window is good example of what I've seen called a 'fossil'. The margins are bordering on too big, wasting space, and you can't resize it! Incidentally adding a resizing function is what's taking me so long to complete the filter frame patch from the other thread (and lack of time this week {and 'wasting' even more replying here instead!}). Don't get me wrong, some margin is necessary for the reasons you mentioned, I guess I prefer them on the smaller side.

Many of the elements in the GUI dialogs are still positioned/sized by use of 'magic' numbers. I've been replacing them with the named constants whenever I work on a dialog (and I see others doing so now too) but there's just too many to do all at once. Once all the magic is gone, those compile time constants could be made variable and read from the skin or .tab. And then, margins, extra spacing, button sizes, positioning, etc could all be adjusted when reskinning.

I think we have different ideas what the word consistency means. We have here two dialogs which show statistics. The one has a relaxed layout, the other one a cramped layout. So why do you say you prefer cramped layout, if the other window already has a relaxed layout? It's a personal opinion, but nowhere near a consistent attribute of the dialogs. Schedule e.g. is super-cramped, and sound is very relaxed. I can list more if needed.

Symptom of changing things piecemeal. i.e. I haven't got around to 'cramping' all the dialogs yet. 

As we can see from the screenshot, the finance window has a fixed size. (This is again not consistent with the city window which can be resized)

The city window was only made resizable quite recently. The spacings were all made consistent with the other dialogs that have already undergone work. The finance window is the odd man out here...

[Spike]

Symptom of changing things piecemeal. i.e. I haven't got around to 'cramping' all the dialogs yet. 

The city window was only made resizable quite recently. The spacings were all made consistent with the other dialogs that have already undergone work. The finance window is the odd man out here...

Good. I see I must make my own fork for having an UI that I like. I guess I'll beak my word and start Simutrans coding again, to make something that looks good and is easy to use. And if I feel really evil, I'll try to make it in a way that the changes are very hard to merge back.

[prissi]

Nearly all dialogs with statistics with button with the exception of the finance window [and factory staticstics] (i.e world statistics, convoi statistics, halt statistics, line statistics, city window) have this arrangement of buttons. But TurfIt said it all.

[Spike]

I'll continue over there:

http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=9147.msg85453#msg85453

I want to merge the UI and coding discussions.