>Granted, I work at an art school so i may be a little critical but the
>hypercard icons while only B&W are actually nicer than the MC icons.
Eric,
honestly spoken, I would have expected a loud yell about MC's interface
from an art school person. I have arts major course and it hurts my eyes.
Text in buttons is vertically centered the wrong way (too close to the
bottom), most buttons waste space, it just doesn't look Mac-like enough for
me.
Using 9pt Geneva is surely useless these days, but at least Chicago 12 (or
Charcoal, or Espy) could be expected. Also, what feature is where is pretty
un-intuitive. If you need some help, I can assist you, as I have already
hacked around in MC a bit.
>They dialogue boxes are rather huge, and black on grey is a bad scheme.
It's not quite optimal. For check boxes it's acceptable if it's a lighter
shade of gray, and it's a bold font, like Chicago, but Helvetica is
unreadable.
>So, at least from an aesthetic/artistic perspective, i guess i volunteer to
>start doing some artsy craftsy stuff - would that be useful or desirable? I am
>assuming i can edit dialogue boxes using resEdit (which i am not sure of since
>all MC dialogue boxes and palettes are in fact stacks). I can also edit the
>cursor icons (and then save the documents as picts which i assume can be
>exported to ibm pc format).
MetaCard's editor is all MetaCard stacks. They're mostly substacks of the
Home stack and the Help stack. You'll notice that editing substacks is
pretty awkward. Those background "groups" are also hard to work with. my
suggestion is that you re-arrange the menus and dialogs. I used to send
lots of messages to Scott, maybe I can dig them up again.
>Its funny because the color palettes and functionality of buttons and fields
>are definitely superior to mac - the dialogues are a little boxy, the cursors
>a little bulky - but those icons are, well, impossible.
Yeah. Especially the tool palette icons look like the drawings I did on my
first day with a Mac -- in HyperCard, using a mouse and the freehand tool.
>Please let me know if i should start working on the following resources:
>
>icons
>cursors
>dialogue boxes
I'd also ask you to change the menus. The best way to do this would be to
make a backup of the home and help stacks (just in case). Then you should
copy the home stack, rename it and edit the things in there. I might still
have a sample stack that demonstrates the basics of an MC editor stack,
I'll look for it.
>if such be the case I can expect to have produced a couple hundred icons and a
>dozen cursors in a month or so: the dialogue boxes i can't say because i do
>not know if they are stored as resources (i hope) or stacks (oh well i wanted
>to learn their user interface and stack architecture anyway...)
I think we won't need 100 icons. We should focus on the ones actually used
in the user interface. An icon library can be added later.
>Oh, i expect to have a draft of the partnership agreement before the end of
>november and am indeed only waiting for commentary upon what has been
>suggested so as to avoid duplication of effort.
Cheers,
-- M. Uli Kusterer
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