Add some color to Visual Studio 2012
Usability studies have shown that both shape and color help to distinguis visual elements in a UI. The upcoming/current beta release of Visual Studio 2011 has removed color from the toolbars and from icons in e.g. the Solution Explorer.
Please make this optional so those of us that want a more accessible and user friendly IDE can have their cake and eat it too.
Michiel
shared this idea
Hi folks,
Take a look at the VS 2012 Color Theme Editor – it is an option for creating and editing your own Visual Studio themes.
http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/366ad100-0003-4c9a-81a8-337d4e7ace05
thanks,
Doug Turnure – Visual Studio PM
1156 comments
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rchutch
commented
I really don't think that any software gerdi ever writes will make it very far. He or she can't string together more than about 5 or 6 words without throwing in an obcenity or doing his (or her) best to tear someone else apart. People like that self destruct before very long. Hopefully, they just keep their flame throwing verbal.
What is good however, is that there are people who are slowing gnawing away at the IDE problems and coming up with things like the theme editor and the add-in that restores some of the icons. People who have real work to do with the IDE appreciate their efforts.
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brian
commented
Gerdi
If that's your attitude I would hate to be a user of your software . User interface is so important to the success of a program. The whole of the metro/Windows 8 is panning out to be a disaster, simply beceause Microsoft has refused to listen to real users! Fortunately for us due to the poor design of Windows 8 our users don't want Windows 8 apps, in fact they have told us that they would move to a competitor if we forced it on them! The only thing saving Microsoft is that they can force it on their users buying lower end computers!
Fortunately we can stick with the fantastically well designed VS2010 - should mention we get VS2012 via MSDN subscriptions so it's not even a cost issue for us.
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gerdi
commented
@Jesse McGrew Thank god im in the minority . To be associated with "developers" who are crying about how they cant program effectively cause there is less color in the IDE is something i am struggling to comprehend rationally. It has kept me awake at night thinking of sh!t theses 12k+ developers are trying to develop and god forbid if I ever have to use one of their programs.
"takes me 2x longer to identify icons" ><
" which is the difficulty of differentiating UI elements from each other" .. WHat!?
"Currently NOT using 2012, too ugly!!!!" ..derp"what a shame for developing such ****" .. Yes no color so the IDE is sh!t dont mention any of its new features ..Support for C++ AMP, IntelliSense uses fuzzy logic and the improved ability for extension devs, this being a tiny short list of the improvement in VS.
sorry but this is all close to ********.
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Jesse McGrew
commented
The "hot" suggestions here also include four about the new look just on the first page. This is something that's important to developers, if only because the new look is so distracting that it can't be ignored.
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Jesse McGrew
commented
"Who cares about the bloody color scheme?" Gee, I don't know, maybe the 12,000+ people who voted for this suggestion and made it the most popular suggestion on this site (by far). If you like the new look, congratulations, you're in Microsoft's target audience. But you're also in the minority.
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gerdi
commented
"can work properly with such a user unfriendly interface" ( i assume you meant "cant". The fact that you cannot even properly construct sentences might be a more serious issue then the IDE's color scheme ) .. seriously . wtf is wrong with you ppl. you all sound like little children. what the **** is becoming of developers.. Color ... who the **** cares about the bloody color scheme?
You **** right microsoft doesnt give a **** about winy little *******. Go use xcode **** -
david
commented
hate the colour schemes in visual studio 2012, everything is ****** to see and navigate. all the visual cues I have been used to are no longer. Wish i never got the upgrade from 2008
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Tom
commented
What a nasty move bring back colors into our life! Nobody want and can work properly with such a user unfriendly interface going back to 2010 as well until this is hopefully quickly fixed but based on the blog post about this problem I highly doubt that MS is giving any s..t about their customers.
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FUNNIGALO
commented
I COULDN'T DISAGREE MORE, HAVING CHANGED MY WAY OF LIFE WITH THE NEW MICROSOFT DESIGNS I HAVE NO NEED FOR LOWERCASE OR COLOR IN MY LIFE, **** I EVEN CHANGED MY TV TO BLACK AND WHITE.
NOW ALL WE NEED IS FOR THE GLORIOUS RIBBON TO BE ADDED TO VISUAL STUDIO AND MENU'S PERMANENTLY REMOVED AND THE TRANSFORMATION WOULD BE COMPLETE.
OK OFF TO STICK MY FINGERS IN THE LIGHT SOCKET!
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Anonymous
commented
I can appreciate that the developers want to move away from the some of the insanely over complicated UI's that some people have been turning out, and that a Clean and Simple UI have a great appeal to me, but going to monochrome is just to far, as mentioned before the monochrome icons have lost most of there at a glance recognition, the shipped colour theme of great on grey is just asking for eye strain.
Even the relatively simple things like VB files having blue icons and C# having Green has been removed which has made at a glance identification of what language you are working in a point with out having to check file extensions and open files.
With .Net supposedly Enshrining the "It doesn't Matter what language you write it in" principle its now made a multilingual coding environment a total painso i vote yes for a Simple Clean interface, but no to the DOS Edit style
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radioman.lt
commented
..they don't give a F_U_C_K about this
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Basic
commented
@The product team - Do you really feel it's acceptable to ship a product with such a glaring problem, then rely on a 3rd party tool to partially patch it?
What about proper colours in icons?
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ITMAGE
commented
Hey people, now Microsoft is screwing up the MSDN site as well by removing the CLASSIC view in favor of the 'grey theme'. I created a thread for this:
Also you might want to post over here as well:
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Jordan
commented
Going back to VS2010 cant handle it
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Anonymous
commented
it is very bad Design especially the icons
i need option to retrieve the icons in VS 2010 -
Martin Kirk commented
Icons are Black and White... all over... its f*king horrible !!!
takes me 2x longer to identify icons
I've used VSIP to copy file icons from VS09 to VS12... but the intellisense icons are still Fugly
thank for this pile of ****
idiot designer ! -
Les Arnott
commented
I just brought up the image editior in VS2012 for the first time. There are 3 toolbar buttons for Red, Green and Blue channels. Guess what colors are used for the buttons? Yup, black and white!
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gerdi
commented
in 1989
dev1 - "In the future developers will care more about whether there is color in the editor, the icons and the case of letters then the actual functional performance of the IDE"
dev2 - "I dont think they will be that naive ,if they have any sort of creativity they will just write their own isolated shell which should be around by then, or just tweak what they dont like, the'll just snoop the **** out of it. they'll probably learn a whole bunch about the structure of the IDE and in the process just become better developers."
dev1:" Nah they'll probably just complain, its easier that way."
dev2:" If anything they just be trolled by apple fanboys who spend more time on their hair then in code"
dev1:"what is "trolled""
dev2:"I just made that word up, its when people just complain about random stuff and spend more time complaining then working out solutions"2012 ... 12,261 votes later
dev2 facepalms on his deathbed
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radioman.lt
commented
@Tom it's very ON topic, but remember this is ****** world ruled by freakin fascism.. what else do you expect ;D soon there will be dark ages.. and you can write code on the stones ;}
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ITMAGE
commented
@anonymous " see the proliferation of Metro to MSDN and Blog content...., barely contrasting colors selected for text, confusing layouts... "
Absolutely on the mark. Lately I've been finding it more tiresome to view areas of MSDN because of the all the grey text. It's like they either choose grey text on a white background or grey text on a grey background which is insanely hard on the eyes. If you look though, this seems to be a trend on the web as many other sites are going this way as well. For example, the other day I was working on an iOS project and reading (well trying to read) docs over at Apple's dev site, and it was all grey too. What the fascination is with grey and reduced color and contrast, I just don't know. Maybe their 'marketing' people think the screen looks less cluttered with grey text than black? Well,,, yeahhh,, duhhh, because it's ****** to actually see! This really needs to stop. These marketards are creating a disaster for us. We write code, we read lots of docs, we generate software, that's what we do! These sites and tools need to be geared towards OUR needs, and not make some blasted fashion statement. Anyway, I'm ranting and off topic now.
