Re: [lmi] pre-wx-2.9.5 appearance changes

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Fri, 12 Jul 2013 19:04:04 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> Compared to the wx-2.9.3 release, on msw xp sp3 (with an
GC> unusual graphics card and an unusual screen resolution),
GC> I notice two changes in the appearance of lmi's toolbar:
GC> 
GC> (1) Improvement: buttons are now vertically centered. With
GC> 2.9.3, they were top-aligned. (Maybe I could have accomplished
GC> the same thing with 2.9.3 by using some flag, but it's nice
GC> that the default behavior is more attractive.)

 I must admit I have no real idea why did this change, but as there are
worse problems with the toolbar I didn't even look into this.

GC> (2) Regression: grayed buttons are less attractive with the
GC> new build. Formerly, they looked like gray-scale equivalents
GC> of the full-color buttons; now, they seem to use only two
GC> shades of gray. One particularly noticeable example is
GC> lmi's 'save.png', which is derived from 'stock_save.png'
GC> in the 24x24 gnome-icon-theme icon set. I'll send a small
GC> screen capture privately.

 The trouble is that I can't reproduce this in the wxWidgets toolbar
sample, using the same icon. It does appear correctly there while in your
build it almost seems like its transparency is not taken into account at
all which makes me wonder if this could be not toolbar-related at all but
due to the recent upgrade of libpng -- could it be somehow broken when
built with MinGW 3.4?

 But OTOH my testing did find see several _other_ problems with the
disabled buttons in the toolbar so maybe the problem is still in this code.
But, again, I don't see it in the sample and I checked that its appearance
didn't change since 2.9.3.

 I'll build LMI itself tomorrow and see if I at least the problem there.
Do I understand correctly that you are testing under Windows XP with visual
themes disabled?

GC> Tabbed dialogs look almost the same. The newer version aligns
GC> groupbox (box sizer) labels more attractively, centering them
GC> better with the border. Another improvement is that a slight
GC> amount of space (maybe three pixels) has been added at the
GC> left margin of many textcontrols, making their contents a
GC> little easier to read.

 Yes, the margins were harmonized (they could be either 3 pixels or 0
depending on the way wxTextCtrl was created), I remember agonizing for a
long time over whether we should be using 3 or 0 in all cases, so I'm glad
you like the value I finally chose.

 Thanks for your testing and hopefully I'll have more news about the
toolbar problem soon,
VZ