Re: [lmi] [PATCH] Skin appearance improvements

[Greg Chicares]

On 2016-06-26 23:31, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> 
>  I'm returning to another almost month-old request from this post
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/lmi/2016-05/msg00121.html in which you
> wrote:
> 
>> Would you mind fixing those apparent errors? And if you can spare the
>> time...
>>   "single premium": "Policy" listbox should be expanded vertically
>>      (there might be one hundred items in this listbox)
>>   "coli boli": inconsistent borders between "Corp" and "Agent" tabs
>>   "group carveout" skins: "Names" tab labels misaligned with fields
>> Those are the glaring UI sins that jump out at me; you may find others.
>  
>  All these apparent errors are fixed by https://github.com/vadz/lmi/pull/44
> and here are some additional explanations:
> 
>  First problem was trivial and I think the patch fixing it
> (https://github.com/vadz/lmi/pull/44/commits/3404093f6963f002f7fd8665539b5d37e5f834fa)
> should be uncontroversial.

Okay.

Here's an odd thing I notice, either with or without this patch.
When I first open the tabbed dialog, the "Policy" listbox is
narrow: perhaps thirty pixels wide. If I change the dialog's size
in either dimension, the width grows to perhaps fifty pixels; it
retains that width if I resize the dialog again. The XRC file
sets the width at fifty:
  <size>-1,50</size>
so apparently that <size> element isn't honored until the dialog
is resized. Merely moving the dialog doesn't affect the width.

I see the same phenomenon with most other skins, but not with
'skin.xrc', so maybe the cause is badly-written xml rather than
a layout problem in the wxXRC code.

>  The second one is much less clear as the borders are indeed inconsistent
> but I don't know which one is correct and which one is wrong. After
> examining this skin file, I think the intention was to use 4 pixels for the
> outer border and 2 pixels for all internal borders, so I've adjusted all
> borders to be consistent with this. As you can see
> (https://github.com/vadz/lmi/pull/44/commits/d9355cebf5d655a56063834903d36561be3f1576),
> this has resulted in quite a number of changes -- but less than there would
> have been if I had done the converse.

Much better. I made a further one-character adjustment in
commit ff0d8eeef08cb3433a73e464403758d684a72a20 (q.v.).

>  Also, while I fixed borders in this skin, I didn't touch the other ones,
> but there are plenty inconsistencies in those two. I'm not really sure if
> it's really important for the different skins to be consistent however, as
> I think that end users rarely use more than one.

Some end users will use more than one, now that we've made it easy to
switch.

> Still, it would arguably
> be better to use the same border conventions for all of them and, whatever
> is the subjective choice of the borders size, the group carveout skin which
> doesn't use any borders at all on its "Names" page is objectively ugly.

There are plenty of improvements we can make later. For now, I just
want to get rid of some of the most glaringly ugly mistakes.

>  While I was looking at skin_coli_boli.xrc, I also noticed a TODO comment
> there which I removed, together with the sizer it was related to, as it
> just seemed like such a low hanging fruit
> (https://github.com/vadz/lmi/pull/44/commits/6e70ebfdfe612f6c061993914ca73ceeb9e0e561).

Thanks. We should have done that long ago.

>  The third issue, with the "Names" tab also required a lot of changes
> because it's just impossible to align items belonging to the different
> sizers, so I had to replace two previously used independent sizers with a
> single wxFlexGridSizer
> (https://github.com/vadz/lmi/pull/44/commits/c3410858fec94a0b335e29e82b28683f5669bf94).
> I also used this as an opportunity to rearrange the controls in what looks
> like a more logical order to me, please see the attached "before" and
> "after" screenshots.

This is a major improvement.

The alignment was so poor that I thought "Employee Class" was a stray
static label with no corresponding input field.

> If you also prefer the new appearance, I think it
> should be applied to all the other address entry zones in all the skins,
> please let me know if I should do this.
> 
>  As for the "other problems" mentioned below: there are many, many other
> things I'd like to change in the different skins, but it's going to take
> quite some time to do it. So I wonder whether I (a) should do it at all and
> (b) if yes, then which skins have the highest priority, i.e. are most
> frequently used in practice, so that I could start with them?

Tight budget--let's defer that until some unknown future time.

'skin_group_carveout3.xrc' is just a 'skin_group_carveout.xrc' clone
with the "Inforce" tab removed, so I copied the changes you made to
the latter into the former.