Defending The Battleship

Do you remember when Windows Presentation Foundation first came out and suddenly all the Microsoft WPF avangelists were saying, "Battleship Grey... Yuck!" to put down traditional Windows forms to make WPF sound better.

Well you know what. They missed a very important point. It was never just battleship grey.

Back in '93, I worked for a place that hired a consultant who, for as much as I could see, spent 30 mins every morning changing the colour scheme of his Windows... uhm was it 3.1. First he started off through all the team colours for Rugby League and then after exhausting that sport, moved onto AFL. (These are two types of football games for any international reader out there).

And about the same time, Visual Basic was getting popular and we started to get lots of crazy coloured contexts. You know, the sort of app where all the windows to deal with accounts receivable are in green, while all the accounts payable are in pink and so on.

And this used to ifuriate me so much because the Win API had some clearly defined custom colours that were just being ignored. If you choose your own colour scheme then everyone used the colours the developer liked. But if you used the system colour schemes then the user could use the system configuration tool to choose their own colour scheme.

Why is this a good thing?

Well not so my colleague could keep himself entertained for half an hour every morning.

But rather, because the eye and all the wiring and process to support it is possibly the most complex organ ever developed in evolution. And Most people are not average but sit somewhere on a bell curve. Half the people have better than average sight and half the people have below average sight.

Some have colour blindness, some are dislexic, some work in light too bright, some work in dark rooms. And the ability to change the colour scheme of you whole system and all supporting applications in a single go is absolutely essential.

For example, I am dislexic, and I've found that if I tone the white background of text fields to a slight blue/grey then I can actually avoid headaches that I otherwise get after a while reading black text on a white background.

These days I wear tinted glasses that do much the same thing, but being able to adjust the colour of the background still helps.

It was one of the things I was looking forward to Windows Phone 7 because I had heard they had tight control on colours. But Windows Phone 7 was a little too locked down and the colour schemes that the user's had to choose from had some serious flaws.

It's something I miss with Web Development, where "graphic treatments" are order of the day and no one seems to care about us poor dislexics. There is probably more effort put into helping blind people read web pages through trying for WC3 Accessability conformance.

But at the same time, if you've done enough browsing, you will almost certainly come across a web page where you find the colour scheme so bizarre that you can barely make out the text, and usually have to select the text with the mouse just so you can read using the inverted colours.

Wouldn't you like to be able to control colours on certain web sites? Without resorting to hacing the CSS that is.