I don’t know who at Google, Microsoft, Apple, or whoever came up with the ‘modern’ low contrast pastel interfaces used in today’s programs and websites, nor do I care; but Formlabs, don’t follow every other idiot company that thinks light gray text on a light gray or white background is a good idea. Quit making controls so damn tiny one needs the computer equivalent of tweezers to operate them with surgical precision. Quit hiding sub-menus under other controls without any obvious visible hint that there is more there.
Not everyone has 20/10 vision and/or night vision eyesight to see this hard to read nonsense. The best Windows based interfaces were from the XP followed by the 7 eras. Plenty of contrast, control over the interface, logical (for the most part) arrangement and hints that hidden controls exist.
Even this page I’m typing this out on is a pain in the butt to read.
Attached is a screenshot of my 30" monitor I do my graphics on. Although my mouse cursor didn’t show up in the capture; at normal size the mouse cursor is approximately twice as big as the slice scroll-bar grab button. Manually manipulating the model is harder yet with the tiny sliver thin globe grab bars. At the very least; please let users customize the interface (within reason) to their liking.
Although contrast can be an issue here, I think the real culprit is scaling. Your high definition display isn’t managed well by most softwares. In this case the interface should definitely be bigger.
I’m running 2560 x 1600 on my 7+ year old Dell 30" monitors. This was never a problem until Windows 10 gained traction. I’m not crazy about scaling up stuff because of the jaggies icons and other screen elements develop. Besides, I buy large monitors for screen resolution and real estate.
Attached is a screen shot of Macrosuck Word 2007 that has a very readable interface. I actually like Office 2003 better; but Office 2007 and 2010 are OK.
Perhaps along those same lines…We print in mostly white. You bring a model into the PreForm display and you have white on white since the representation of the base of the build paltform is white. Until you orient the model around the X or Y axis, the model is virtually invisible (looking from the top).
A simple fix (I would guess it would be simple…?) would be to give some color to the build platform in the PreForm display, then there would be no white on white situation.
I’m thinking that the person or persons who developed the PreForm software never really had to use it in the scenario I describe…or they would have surely fixed that.
Another thing that ticks me off is insistence on HUGE FONT SIZES, but with super thin low contrast typography. That plus huge amounts of whitespace everywhere. Because someone somewhere said that “information density should be low” and now everyone takes that to mean “make everything hidden and show up on mouseover, enlarge the font sizes, and blow up the margins and spacing to 500%”. Like you’re supposed to scribble notes in the margin or something.
The huge font sizes rarely crop up for me; but small font sizes with the same annoying behavior that you describe really chaps my hide.
Another good example is this dialog box that I’m typing my reply to you. There is no way to change the font size or color, with only bold and/or italic being offered.
