Initial Feedback

[KristofMorva]

Hey Plastic team,

I have used the new GUI for a session, and I thought I'd share my thoughts:

- Having only a left side-bar instead of tabs is way better, +1

- With the dark theme I have encountered a lot of contrast issues:

(text overdraw, making the background fade like 90% black could solve it)

(View button, gray on the green)

(both links and change highlights)

(dark button on dark background)

(same as before, really tiring to read)

(I... couldn't say what that image is if I didn't stick my face into the screen)

- There were some smaller bugs I won't list here because I'm sure others will do, but there was one breaking bug; this popup popped up, you press OK, and before you could do anything, it pops up again (and again and again, forever; I had to Alt+F4 2 times and restart the app):

- Headers would be much cooler if they also had dark theme:

- I probably can't explain this properly, but I feel your font causes eye strain (especially bold text), they are kinda hard to read. For example, look at "New" here (changelog excerpt):

- And since it's an all new UI and whatnot... I really wished that auto-update was not a 1990-style one anymore (restarting explorer.exe, slow, uninstall-reinstall), but more like GitHub (or, well, any modern SCM client:

- Options of Changes uses totally different tab styles than the App Preferences (former looking great, the second one... not so much):

In general, it's great that you're unifying your client applications, working on a modern dark theme, and asking for feedback before actually releasing it - awesome! However, it still does feel a bit "off" compared to modern apps like GitKraken or GitHub; which are probably partly caused by the aforementioned issues; I hope the full version will introduce a great, consistent UX with proper colors for all windows / tabs

[mariechristineb]

Hi @KristofMorva, 

Thank you so much for taking the time to provide detailed feedback on our dark theme UI! We will fold this feedback as part of our next design audit. It has already been shared with our team. 

 

[GwynRoberts]

Hi @KristofMorva,

I'm Gwyn, Senior Developer in the GUI Team. I just wanted to share some of the improvements we made based on your feedback. We really appreciate the time you took to take those screenshots and share your thoughts.

1. Improved contrast of the progress overlay:

:

 

2. Improved contrast of incoming changes notification:

 

3. Improved side panel icon contrast:

 

4. Made the bold font a bit less bold to improve legibility:

 

5. Regarding the Preferences icons, we are planning to rework that entire dialog, so we didn't make any improvements at this time.

6. We agree with your point about the window headers. We're aiming to address that in a future release.

 

7. We weren't able to reproduce the issues you saw with url highlighting, so please let me know if this continues to be an issue for you. Here is how they appear for me:

 

Thanks again for your feedback. You should see the changes above in the next release, which ought to be available next week. (Any release >= 10.0.16.6356). Please feel free to get in touch with us with any further thoughts you have.

Best regards,

Gwyn

[KristofMorva]

Hey @GwynRoberts, thank you for the update, it's much better!

I can't repro URL issue anymore either, so something has fixed it 🎉

I was navigating around in the new version a bit more, and found some low-priority ones, but thought that it's worth to share:

• On the compare window, the URL icon on the right side is barely visible:

• This is something very priority 500 million, but on the white theme the contrast of the Theme arrow is too low imo (but maybe it's just my color vision; dark skin version looks good!):
• I think the default-bold text is affected throughout the application. Just to give another example (sounds like I'm nit-picking but I honestly think it's not comfortable to read):

• And again, something not super important, I just came across it; some icons are really not "crisp". For some reason it's not that visible on the white theme, but on the dark one it kinda is: Just to explain what I mean, this one feels much better (I don't mean the shape; just the aliasing of the curve):

None of these things is a tragedy, just wanted to let you know

Cheers,
Kristóf

[GwynRoberts]

Hi Kristóf,

Great feedback again! We'll add these items into our plan for the next round of GUI improvements.

Thanks again for taking the time to do this.

Gwyn