[maemo-developers] Community widgets for Fremantle

[From: Cornelius Hald]

On Fri, 2009-09-25 at 22:55 +0200, Thomas Perl wrote:
> Depending on the use case, having a nice finger-friendly color palette
> could be *much* better than letting the user fine-tune the colors. I think
> most color-choosing tasks (e.g. in Conboy) are not about getting some
> really specific shade of green, but just getting a "cute" color that happens
> to be green. A nice palette with beautiful colors can help here.

That's a very good point.

> I propose a dialog with finger-usable buttons that just has the colors of the
> Tango Color Palette in it:
> 
> http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Icon_Theme_Guidelines

Yes, they are really nice.

> Give the users less choice and more sane defaults ;) You can always add
> that "Advanced" button with a hex entry field for the nerds later on.

Also a very good point. It's probably good to put this into a sub dialog
- it would fit to the Fremantle philosophy.

So how about a dialog that just shows n rows with 3 to 4 colors in each
row. Those rows are in a panable area so it's easy to scroll them. Those
colors are taken from a palette and (maybe) colors that have been
selected in the advanced dialog are appended at the top or bottom of
that list. Maybe separated by some kind of separator.

I think that would look nice and it should be quite usable.

To try that I did two quick mockups (ugly as usual). First, the color
button:
http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/color_button_mock.png
Instead of "Use Cust" imaging labels like "Text", "Links",
"Background" :)

When clicking on of those color buttons a dialog like this opens:
http://zwong.de/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/color_chooser_mock.png
Probably the buttons/colors should be bigger or there should be 4 in a
row. As I said, just a very quick mockup. Those buttons are pannable, so
there are more colors available.

When clicking the "Advanced" button a dialog opens which has a color
wheel or RGB sliders or something like that.


Thanks for your input Thomas!
Conny