JakubH Posted December 13, 2013 Report Share Posted December 13, 2013 I finally try the new major version of the Plastic SCM to find out if it is worth (and safe) for us to upgrade from Plastic 4.1.10.xxx to Plastic 5.0.44.xxx. I found several nice new features and some drawbacks too. Now, it is time to share my thoughts and workarounds. I hope I won't be too negative when I skip many of those nice new things (which are covered in release notes and blog posts) and describe the problematic parts only. The first big noticeable change in Plastic 5 is a new look and feel. I have posted already that I am not a big fan of the current monochromatic fashion in GUI design. However, monochromatic icons can be OK, if they are smart and legible. For instance Adobe Photoshop icons are monochromatic too but I can distinguish among them quite easily and I understand what each of them means. I must say that I have been disappointed a bit when I install Plastic 5. I found several of the new icons incomprehensible and inconsistent. It is true that it was not ideal in the Plastic 4.1 too. Some of the oddities were fixed in Plastic 5 but not all; and several new strange things appeared. I've shown the new Plastic icons to my colleagues to find out if they can guess what each of the new icon in the main menu mean. They have not succeeded. Maybe the main problem which I have are the overlay icons. It is almost impossible to see the difference between a Controlled and a Changed (locally) item, on some monitors at least. The good thing here is, that the icons can be changed now, because of the new themes support. The icons are actually .png pictures in a theme folder now. It is not great because they are one size only, but it is easy to change them at least. So here I share my quick try to change some icons to be more understandable, consistent and distinguishable; for me at least. Hope that somebody find it helpful. my-Plastic-5-icons.zip It contains the changed icons only (be sure to backup the original ones first). It doesn't affect icons in extensions like a shell extension or a VS extension. The second drawback which I found is the Annotate in a Visual Studio. Annotate view in a Visual Studio (opened from a context menu of a file) has been a bit different than the Annotate used in a standalone Plastic GUI. I completely understand why Codice choose to unify those two, but there was an advantage of the VS Annotate which is lost now – the proper syntax highlighting. Reading a code without syntax highlighting seems very ancient to me. So these two suggestions are quite important for us: https://plasticscm.uservoice.com/forums/15467-general/suggestions/5159510-add-syntax-highlighting-to-annotate https://plasticscm.uservoice.com/forums/15467-general/suggestions/2447287-add-syntax-highlights-when-using-merge-and-diff-wi The funny thing about the second suggestion is that there already is a simple syntax highlighting, but user have to turn it on every single time, which is really stupid. There is actually a second feature which was better in the VS Annotate than in the regular Annotate in Plastic GUI. The annotation was only one per block and a user can select a block and then all corresponding changes (from the same changeset) was highlighted. (There was a problem that the annotation was stuck to the first line of a block, so it went away if you scrolled down, but otherwise it was cleaner than the current view.) OK. It is all for now. It's too long post already, anyway. my-Plastic-5-icons.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
calbzam Posted December 16, 2013 Report Share Posted December 16, 2013 Hi, We thank your feedback and for sharing your icons and also for helping us to improve annotate view Regards, Carlos Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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