Submission details
Too much "forced" white coloring in UI
When using Areo (and to a lesser degree, Windows Classic UI), there are area's of the Vista GUI that do not adhere to color choices in the Classic Appearance preferences". Presumably some of the core Vista applications use non-standard UI elements, or "new" UI elements that do not adhere to "legacy" color choices.
Some people really do not like "bright white" backgrounds, as it hurts their eyes. I am one of those people. However no matter what I do in Vista, there is no escaping the white.
An easy way to illustrate this is to change your "Window Background" color, and then open up Explorer.exe and Services.msc side by side. Additionally changing most of these settings results in "ugly" controls such as combo-boxes, as you can see in the IE address bar.
See screen shot! It was taken after configuring the "Classic Appearance preferences" to use light-gray backgrounds.
A good OS feature would be "instant on", not "instant ugly".
Either:
1. Provide additional colorization options
2. Make Vista UI elements adhere to "classic" color choices.
3. At the very least, provide some subdued color schemes.
High
Medium
Not fixed
Discussion (5 comments)
no sure what you mean. I mean to show that the services dialog is colored gray...but the explorer window is still white.
actually, the Classic Appearance Properties panel never had all of the window coloring options that windows is capable of, but once you get either Luna OR Aero, the number of possible customizations goes up while the user configurations remain the same. with the windows 3.11 style you've got about 30 colorization options not available to the user, going to windows 95 that number goes up, then to win98, Me and 2000 it goes up again, although you do get the gradient option for the titlebars now. then with winXP, you've got the same user options, but almost double the hidden options, and with vista the hidden options rises again, with no more user options, and using Aero, some of those user options are totally meaningless. the Classic Appearances Properties panel is really just a joke anymore.
In line with Sarreq, it seems like Windows would be better off taking the approach set by XP where only a few specific themes are offered per release: Classic, Luna, Aero, etc, and removing the classic appearances panel entirely. It's next to impossible for developers to include, say, a resource for a gradient menu command button that will look nice with whatever color a user chooses in that panel. That's one of the many reasons why Office will generally "ignore" all of those settings in favor of its own scheme.
In line with Sarreq, it seems like Windows would be better off taking the approach set by XP where only a few specific themes are offered per release: Classic, Luna, Aero, etc, and removing the classic appearances panel entirely. It's next to impossible for developers to include, say, a resource for a gradient menu command button that will look nice with whatever color a user chooses in that panel. That's one of the many reasons why Office will generally "ignore" all of those settings in favor of its own scheme.
.Chris wrote on June 8, 2008, 2:01am
well the part where computer is is normal. you click on the bread crumb it turns white