On 23 May 2004 at 15:30, Darcy James Argue wrote: > 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. > > 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. . . .
The articles at Ars Technica and Ask Tog certainly caused me to think that it was a contributing factor -- having to calculate every stack of pixels down to the first non-transparent one seems to me like a fairly computationally intensive process. But I'll take your word for it. > 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. . . . How is this less useful than a windowshade UI? > . . . 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. OK, you've come up with *one* UI component where transparency is useful. Why, then, should it be implemented system-wide? > 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. On Windows, Tobias has implemented his plugins with a windowshade like roll-up when the plugin window doesn't have the focus. This means the dialog not only leaves more of the Finale window visible, but it also actually takes up less space. Isn't taking up less space more desirable, since it reveals more of the windows behind it while also making those visible areas fully accessible, which, so far as I can tell, a transparent pallette would not? -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
