Changed default background color

[chrisb]

Why should we wait?

Why should we not wait. Is there anything making it urgent? FreeCAD is not a static background picture on the screen, it is a tool to work with, and that means to work with many different colors.
It doesn't make much sense to me to decide on the background color, and see later, that it collides with some other preferred color. As an example we can take the green color of a fully constrained sketch. Which I think we should keep. But if we decide on a green background, this has to be changed, and then people may realize that they prefer to keep the sketcher color over the new background.

You mentioned above the splash screen for 0.20, and there we decided too on the whole thing and not on certain sub-images.
To present a full color set doesn't mean that changes to single colors wouldn't be possible; which again would be similar to process for the splash screen.

[uwestoehr]

Why should we wait?

Why should we not wait. Is there anything making it urgent?

Waiting does not make progress. My proposal of voting requires some weeks in total and then we should have more weeks for fine-tuning.

We also agreed that we don't need to wait every time a year for a major release. In the current cycle the toponaming work is the limit. When this is ready, the major release is ready. If it takes too long for now, we could make a 0.21 release. Maybe something in January is realistic.

It doesn't make much sense to me to decide on the background color, and see later, that it collides with some other preferred color.

I see no other way. There are simply to many colors in the different WBs. We should keep in mind that all WB colors were developed around the current background color. Therefore of course any other background color would require to tweak some WB colors. We cannot e.g. create a set of 10 different background colors in a set of optimized WBs colors. We would need all WBs since FC has different use cases. A FEM guy does not use Sketcher much, maybe never, while a 3D printing guy needs Sketcher daily but never FEM...

I am a fan of "start doing" things. A vote is democratic, inherits the community and I also believe it fits the task perfectly - finding a new default which is for the majority "more modern".

[chrisb]

There are simply to many colors in the different WBs.

That's exactly why it should be done with care.

I see no other way.

I do: propose working color sets. What's so difficult about them? I have already uploaded two of them, thus proving that it can be done. The minimum requirement is that no color should vanish before the background. That's something which can be easily decided. The rest is taste.
I'm a fan of "start doing things" and "avoid doing them wrong". Here both is possible. Shooting fast and failing again should be no option.

[chrisb]

The current version 0.21.30398 has the modified preference pack code merged, so we can easily exchange the preference packs. You can test it already with these two from my posts above:

https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 30#p622848
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic. ... 01#p622896

To test a preference pack:
- Import it with Preferences>General>General>Preference packs>Import config
- apply the imported config

To provide a preference pack:
- Preferences>General>General>Preference packs>Save new...
- give a name to the preference pack, e.g. <yourNamePP> and check these boxes:

Bildschirmfoto 2022-09-20 um 13.54.29.png (74.39 KiB) Viewed 1009 times

- confirm with Ok
- go to the SavedPreferencePacks directory FREECAD_USER_DATA/SavedPreferencePacks/
- you find there a directory with the name you gave to the preference pack, e.g. <yourNamePP>
- upload the file <yourNamePP>.cfg from that directory.

To make things easy to spot, upload also a screenshot showing the background color and the sketcher colors. Sketcher is used in most projects and seems to use a big variety of different colors. See (again) my posts linked at the beginning of this post.

If we should include a screenshot of something else please let me know.

Uwe mentioned FEM colors; however I could not find how to configure them. Thus we should either make them configurable, or choose the colors appropriately.

[uwestoehr]

I do: propose working color sets. What's so difficult about them? I have already uploaded two of them, thus proving that it can be done.

So you want everybody who like to make a background proposal to develop a fully thought color set?

Then we we would not receive many proposals. Not every user who would like to send in a proposal has the knowledge to make a color pack or has the time to learn it.
Personally, I would then not send in something since I don't have the time to check directly all WBs. This would be hours and probably my proposal would not even make it to the second round, then all my work was for nothing.

But when we found a background, we can easily step through the different WBs. We have several power users for the different WBs who work enough with them to make good proposals.

[adrianinsaval]

I agree with uwe, requiring that every proposal come already with the corresponding set of colors is unnecessary and probably a waste since we would likely want to discuss and fine tune that afterwards anyways. However, I say we should prefer colors that would work well or won't need much change to the current sketcher colors so that documentation doesn't become obsolete. To encourage voters to take this into account I think we should make a standard file that would showcase some fo these colors, the proposed backgrounds then should post a screenshot of said file in edit mode and a list of the colors used, if the proposed background obviously does not work with the current sketcher colors then the person making the proposal can propose different colors there and showcase them if he so desires.

[Zolko]

I think we should make a standard file

thank-you for volunteering

[adrianinsaval]

Screenshots of these sketches should be enough to showcase most sketcher colors. We could ask to include in the screenshot some geometry being created in the sketch to see that color too.

I didn't do this here but I guess we should use a zoom level/window size such that the sketch geometry takes the full viewport to get the full gradient.

[adrianinsaval]

probably default shape and edge colors should be taken into account too, so the backgrounds can't be the same light grey as the default shape color or black as the default edge color.

[chrisb]

Then we we would not receive many proposals.

That's just a guess and I could well guess the opposite.

But when we found a background, we can easily step through the different WBs. We have several power users for the different WBs who work enough with them to make good proposals.

I am surprised by the arguments, which seem to be exchangeable just as needed. In the first place it is too difficult to produce a complete color set and would take hours, but when we have a background color to do so is all of a sudden easy ?

What I am missing is the desire to deliver good overall quality. Of course it is nice to show someone FreeCAD while on holidays and hear Oohs and Aahs, but it is also nice if this first impression remains when working for the first couple of hours.

To get both what we want, we could have a process with the following steps:
1) Find a nice background color as you proposed
2) after the first round of voting, define the corresponding color set
3) make the final votings on the complete color set.

As we have seen that polls can have good or very poor participation, should we define a lower limit of participants to be convincing? Let's hope we get the participation of the poll for the splash screen again.