Cogs can think.

About seven months ago, Eugenia wrote on her blog:

Don’t you think that this looks sweet? The statusbar/toolbar font is -2 points smaller than the default font size (minimum size is 8pt). We filed a bug report on GTK+ over a year ago about this but no one seems to care, even if it makes the windows look so much better (applications like Baobab that now comes in Gnome 2.18+ by default would greatly benefit from it because it has a lot of toolbar text). So far in my Gnome desktop I had to disable the toolbar text completely, but with these changes I would leave it on. BeOS and Mac OS X’s toolbar font is also smaller than the rest of the fonts and it’s details like these that make these UIs look “cleaner”. The devil is in the details.

Eugenia and I regularly disagree, but on this one, I agree wholeheartedly with her. Let me explain.

A window is a user interface element comprised of several different areas. From top to bottom, a standard window is made up out of the window title, menubar, toolbar, actual content area, and a statusbar. See the below schematic representation.

Furthermore, a window may contain loads of other areas, such as an address bar, or additional menubars like the bookmarks toolbar in many web browsers. In addition, each window has widgets, such as scrollbars window manipulation widgets (close, minimise, maximise, etc.). Lastly, the content area itself can be divided up into different areas, but you can forget that for the moment.

All these elements of a window need to be differentiated. You see, users need to be able to instantly recognise where each of the standard window areas are, so that he can quickly familiarise himself with said window. You can achieve differentiation in a lot of different ways - by using colours, separating horizontal lines, font differentiation (both typeface as well as font style), those sorts of things.

The challenge, of course, is to strike a perfect balance between easy differentiation on one side, and a clean appearance on the other. If you use all of the differentiation possibilities I just mentioned, you’ll end up with a very messy and cluttered window - achieving exactly the opposite of what you are aiming for. However, if you disregard all of these features, you will end up with, yes, a very clean window - but also a window that is very hard to navigate because it is very difficult to see where one area ends, and the other starts.

Consequently, I’ve been following the KDE4 maturation process with great interest. I have been very eager to see how the KDE guys would balance the scale between easy differentiation, and clean looks - especially taking into account KDE’s history of, well, dumping widgets all over the place. And sadly enough, only a few months before the final release of KDE 4.0, this is what KDE4 looks like.

There is no typeface differentiation. No font style differentiation. No colour differentiation (except for the content area). No colour differentiation. I could live with all that, were it not for the fact that it also lacks… Separating lines. Titlebar, menubar, toolbar - they are on big blob of white. Sure, themes can be changed and all that, but as has been repeated often on the ‘net, defaults matter. And if this is the default, it’s simply a fcuking mess. They put “clean” atop their list of priorities, but ended up with something so clean, it’s close to unusable.

To prove my point, I added a few separating lines between the window areas, and see how much it cleaned up already, by using just a few 1pix lines! Clickety-click for full-size.