Hi all! I like the IDE very much but I'm not very happy with its look and feel. I try to resume my critics and suggestions in the following points: - There is an overall ugly mix of the 3d effect (used in menus and the editor borders), flush 3d effect (inhereited from the Metal Look and Feel and used for comboboxes and normal buttons) and the OfficeXP style (used in toolbars adn panes). - There is an excessive use of grayed colors that can be replaced by blue colors for example: the window toolbars on the left bottom and right side of the IDE may some blue in place of gray. - The editor tabbed pane have tabs that don't look like tabs! - The new icons dont suit to the IDE look and feel: their colors are too saturated when compared to the colors used in the IDE. - There is no unified border style: all types of borders are used: line borders, bevel borders, etched borders. and sometimes there are no borders when they are expected. Examples: container of the editor tabbed pane should have a lowerde bevel border, the dockable windows may have a border for their title pane... - Dialogs may be improved by using a wizard-like style (see the dialogs of eclipse), settings dialog my get a splitpane where the setting explorer stays on the left side and the settings editor on the right side and get rid of the meaningless bevel border... - The dockable windows should be able to share the place when more than one window are docked on the same side of the screen. Enabling this will provide users coming from JBuilder and other IDE to have a project structure and a file structure on the left window side (this can be even a marketing advantage if IDEA enables newcomers to reaarenge their IDE).
IMHO I think there isn't too much work to do inorder to improve the look of IDEA. Changing some icons isn't a good solution. However "cleaning" the whole by using unified borders, colors and dialog style may help a lot! I am waiting for the OPEN API and the support for other look and feels to try my new look and feel with idea (mlf.sourceforge.net) but if the IDE whole look don't get "cleaned" changing the lnf won't help. After this critics I want to say that I am really satisfied with the power of this IDE and love it, that's why I try to help with this post. Thanks a lot for IDEA Developers and Users, Taoufik Romdhane _______________________________________________ Eap-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.intellij.com/mailman/listinfo/eap-list
