On 23 May 2004, at 11:36 AM, David W. Fenton wrote:
If I were MS, the last thing I'd copy would be the transparent dialogs. First, I don't see that there's any benefit to it at all (how often do I *need* to see what's behind a dialog? and, please, don't bring up non-movable dialogs, which don't exist in Windows), and Apple had to work *very* hard on Quartz to make it perform decently.
Hi David,
First off, transparency was never the performance issue with OS X that you make it out to be. There were (and are) other graphical performance issues that tend to slow things down -- the main one being the Quartz anti-aliasing. It's true that window *resizing* is still mysteriously laggy (although Panther is much better in this regard, even on older hardware). But transparency is a piece of cake for any computer with a graphics card less than, say, four years old.
Next, transparency *is* actually useful, at least to me, and also for anyone with a laptop or a small monitor. Ironically, probably the best use of transparency I've seen is in a Microsoft product (albeit the Microsoft Mac Business Unit). In Office 2004 Mac, you have the option of having the Formatting Palette automatically fade -- to as much as 90% transparency -- if it's not being used. This means that people with 1024x768 screens can use *all* of their limited screen real estate for the document they are working on. The Formatting Palette becomes opaque when you mouse over it, and fades again when it's no longer needed. This system actually works exceptionally well, and I'd like to see other apps -- like Finale! -- adopt fading palettes.
To give you another Finale-specific example, I've been bugging Tobias for a while to add the option to control the transparency of TGTools dialogs, especially the Staff List Manager. The big problem with the Staff List Manager is that it's, well, so *big* -- the dialog box is huge (unnecessarily huge, IMO, with lots of wasted space) and it tends to cover up the music that you are trying to adjust. Of course, you can move the dialog around the screen, revealing bits of it at a time, but whole point of using the Staff List Manager is that you want to be able to see the entire page (or, at least, an entire system) at a glance. So yeah, transparency here would be an enormous help.
- Darcy
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