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ProjectsGriffin release 2003/09/15
First release, just a bunch of option settings picked up from Widget Changes.
Download: 
griffin.kit
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Summary: Some good things, but we'd better not mess with colors quite yet, because of how system themes etc. can be tweaked.
Details follow...
Posted at Sep 15/2003 08:16 AM:
DKF: Cool, though this isn't yet there on WinXP.
Posted at Sep 15/2003 08:53 AM:
Will Duquette: It would be nice if the Launcher app could display a list of the specific things that changed. On Windows 2000, the difference between the griffinized and non-griffinized Widget Demo was extremely subtle; I noticed a few color changes here and there, but that was it.
On Solaris 8, though, the differences were striking, and welcome. A few comments:
- In the Griffinized version of the launcher, the background of the main window remains the old blue color. Ugly.
- I note that the active background is still enabled for all of the buttons and menus. For the menus it looks pretty good--just like Win2000, in fact. But it really ought to be turned off for other buttons.
Posted at Sep 15/2003 09:37 AM:
Bryan Oakley: I was a bit surprised that the intial window isn't "griffinized". Shouuld it be?
Also, I think scrollbar borders need to be 1 instead of two -- they look too fat otherwise.
Finally, a big thanks to Mark for keeping the momentum going.
Posted at Sep 15/2003 12:27 PM:
Brett Schwarz: This is a great step forward...thanks to Mark and Steve. I have one thing though. Should we really be messing around with background (i.e. *background)? Should we just default to what ever the system color is? For example, in the griffin demo, both on my Linux and Windows 2K, the backgrounds are mismatched. From experience, it is hard to hard code background colors (unless for text, entry, canvas, etc). For example, for the compose window, the background *around* the entries and the optionmenu are a slightly different color than the background of the over window. Same goes for troughColor...this should be a function of the system color...no?
Will Duquette: Absolutely--but doing that depends on the "named color" TIP.
Posted at Sep 16/2003 01:24 AM:
Arjen Markus: I have looked at the demo on Windows XP and Solaris (SunoS 5.6 - is that Solaris 7?)
I have a few comments:
- There is a very subtle difference in colours on Windows XP (outer frame slightly darker). This may become annoying.
- On Solaris the foreground colour is sometimes white and sometimes black whereas the background is white. This makes some text impossible to read
Just a few observations.
Posted at Sep 16/2003 08:23 AM:
Mark: To help out, it would be great if those of you submitting improvements could generate screenshots... preferably including both the demo app and a (non-Tk) app on your system showing the desired behavior
Posted at Sep 16/2003 01:24 PM:
Jeff Godfrey: Here's an image of the background differences as seen on Win 98SE. The left-hand image is non-Griffinized, the right-hand image is Griffinized. Note the color differences... [link]
Brett Schwarz: Jeff's screen-shot is what I was talking about in my above posting...
Will Duquette: Yes, that's what I commented on above. griffin.kit sets the default color of most widgets to something like the out-of-the-box color scheme for pre-Windows XP versions of Windows--but it doesn't do so completely, so we get weird disparities like this. Unfortunately, we probably can't do much about this until the Named Color TIP goes in--and even then, I bet many programs will need some tweaking.
Posted at Sep 16/2003 11:34 PM:
Arjen Markus: two snapshots on a Solaris
Posted at Sep 16/2003 11:35 PM:
Arjen Markus: Clearly the colours are not recommendable :)
Posted at Sep 17/2003 12:19 PM:
Mark: Note the comments and screenshots do a good job of validating the Methodology, since for this release all I did was copy the options that had been sitting on the Widget Changes page for weeks without comment. :-)
Mark 9/30: Here are two shots on Mac OS X, the first one of the Griffin demo app running on Tk, the second with an equivalent application whipped together with InterfaceBuilder, to give an idea what things should look like. (Note: these are scaled down as displayed in the page, so use whatever right-click menu option your browser gives you to open them up fullsize in their own window).
Posted at Oct 01/2003 05:17 AM:
DKF: Apart from the lack of background texture for non-listbox/text, OSX looks the part. (The font differences aren't very significant IMHO, and it could be argued that the Tk version makes a better choice given that it is code being displayed.)
Posted at Oct 01/2003 06:06 AM:
Mark:well... missing background border texture, the border on the listboxes being too solid and inside rather than outside the scrollbars, the missing border on the text widget, the spacing between widgets and inside the window borders being wrong.. plus menus etc. which are not shown
Posted at Sep 30/2003 02:03 PM:
jcw: Terrific progress. A big thumbs up! Tried on Windows NT4, Mac OS X, and Linux. NT4 bg color slightly off, as mentioned:
