[fpc-other] OS/2 support and text colors

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

Not strictly FPC related, but I know here are some OS/2 software
developers around - and I have no idea where else to ask.

I'm working on supporting OS/2 in fpGUI Toolkit and creating OS/2
themes. Looking at some of the OS/2 screenshots I have collected, I
noticed that in the same dialog you sometimes have blue text and
sometimes black text. Anybody know why, and what is the difference
between the two (other than the color alone)?

Here is an example:

Loading Image...


The only pattern I can see is that "static text" (eg: labels and
groupbox captions) use the blue text, but Checkboxes, Buttons, Menu
Items etc use the black text. I still don't understand IBM's reasoning
behind this though - but would like to know out of curiosity.

Regards,
Graeme

[Tomas Hajny]

On Thu, July 20, 2017 12:00, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:


Hi Graeme,

Post by Graeme Geldenhuys
Not strictly FPC related, but I know here are some OS/2 software
developers around - and I have no idea where else to ask.
I'm working on supporting OS/2 in fpGUI Toolkit and creating OS/2
themes. Looking at some of the OS/2 screenshots I have collected, I
noticed that in the same dialog you sometimes have blue text and
sometimes black text. Anybody know why, and what is the difference
between the two (other than the color alone)?
http://geldenhuys.co.uk/~graemeg/os2_screenshot.png
The only pattern I can see is that "static text" (eg: labels and
groupbox captions) use the blue text, but Checkboxes, Buttons, Menu
Items etc use the black text. I still don't understand IBM's reasoning
behind this though - but would like to know out of curiosity.

I'm on holiday at the moment and thus nowhere close to my OS/2 machine (or
any other PC, in fact). Moreover, I haven't studied the IBM GUI
recommendations, nor analyzed the implementation from this point of view.
Your observation looks correct to me (descriptions in blue and values in
black). However, I'd like to remind you that standard OS/2 dialogues may
be modified using the Font Palette, Color Palette, etc., using drag and
drop, and thus this pattern may change easily - that part may be actually
more important than the default setup if you intend to provide OS/2 native
behaviour to your fpGUI port.

Tomas



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However, I'd like to remind you that standard OS/2 dialogues may be modified
using the Font Palette, Color Palette, etc., using drag and drop, and thus
this pattern may change easily - that part may be actually more important
than the default setup if you intend to provide OS/2 native behaviour to your
fpGUI port.

i'd like to re-enforce this statement about the colorings... on all our OS/2
systems, one of the first things we do is to change the color text of "original"
icons to RED so that they stand out and it is patently signaled that removing
this one means trouble to recreate it if needed in the future... "clones" of
icons have their text GREEN so signal that they can be removed if desired and
that they can easily be "re-cloned" in the future if needed... that's probably
the main coloration changes we make... aside from that, users can set whatever
they desire, for the most part...

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Post by Tomas Hajny
However, I'd like to remind you that standard OS/2 dialogues may
be modified using the Font Palette, Color Palette, etc., using drag and
drop

And and awesome feature it is - which I used frequently when still used
OS/2. The drag-n-drop ability of most (if not all) OS/2 applications
were just awesome! No other OS came close.

Regards,
Graeme