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
1170 comments
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les baker
commented
I am a Development Manager with a small but effective team. I feel it is important to say i have worked for various teams and used every version of Visual Studio from version 4 and up.
However this new interface, quite literally, gives me migraines. I've tried the theme editor, but after several attempts of it crashing my install I broke through and found it made no difference as the icons are still confusing and cause me eye strain to the point that I still suffer from Migraines after using the program for more than 10 minutes. I even tried a hack from one of my fellow develoeprs to replace the icons with those exported from 2010. This kept crashing and still I found the eye strain coming back.
I am REFUSING to upgrade my developers and our projects to 2012. As a result I am also refusing to start new projects using any technology incompatible with Visual Studio 2010.
Why? Because firstly i value my own health and secondly because EVERY MEMBER OF MY DEVELOPMENT TEAM FEEL THE SAME WAY. Come ON Microsoft, how many developers does it take before you will admit you got it WRONG?
Until Microsoft reverts the interface to something more akin to a development environment I am refusing to upgrade and if it goes on much longer i will have to follow my development team's idea of switching to Sharp Develop. At least that won't lose me my sanity.... or my team.
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Anonymous
commented
I see where VS 2013 will have an option to expand the pending changes window so I'm going to have to give them a pass on the "fiddly and small interface" remark - provided it works.
I do hope there's some attention being given to the icon coloring. It's amazing how much it helps.
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Mark S
commented
The theme editor does not fix the indistinguishable icons and the complete lack of borders/etc between UI elements. Every time I see VS 2010 again it reinforces how godawful the 2012 UI is. The only reason I use 2012 is because of async/await.
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Anonymous
commented
I thought there was going to be a new focus on CSS in VS 2012. You have completely removed all of the color cues from the Manage Styles window. The fonts are "larger than they have to be" and all we get now are green check marks to indicate use of a style. I seriously, and I mean SERIOUSLY keep trying to give you guys a chance but every time I do, another feature is missing or has been re-worked to where it's difficult to use.
For example:
The lack of color in the solution and team explorers. It's tough enough to get a visual cue with everything mono-chromatic, then you try to check changes into TFS and find yourself having to drag and drop the ID's of your tasks into a fiddly and small interface. Pending changes is now just a hyperlink to the source control explorer full of more mono-chromatic icons and text. We used to have a docked window that took up no space what-so-ever when auto-hidden and was easy to look at and understand. It grouped your query and source control functions into one window with enough screen space to read the descriptions.
Sorry, but this is not progress.
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exalting
commented
Icons of next version of VS leaked! :)
http://ain.ua/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/iph2.jpg -
brrrdog
commented
A couple of years ago I sat thru a Microsoft sponsored metro development intensive and I remember them talking about guidelines for a clean and crisp UI replacing rules and separators with spacing instead. There is justification in such guidelines in order to bring uniformity to applications and a seamless user experience from OS to app (we all watch how Apple sells iphones on its "features" otherwise known as apps).
But here comes a news flash - Visual Studio is not another messaging, calendar, or mp3 application that some bubble gum chewing brat uses on a 4" screen. It's a massive collection of hundreds if not thousands of features and points of functionality that working professionals use for 50+ hours a week and we NEED color and dividers as more dimensions that helps us slice thru it all. I get that apps for the masses is what makes money and tech companies are no longer catering to the geeks of the world. However, this is one of the few cases where you stop the rant of your new hot shot Jonny Rocket "UX" developer cold in his tracks and say "Sit down son, this is a **** of a lot more than the wooppie cushion app you just pooped out."
I've used ever version of Visual Studio since it's original release and it has been the gold standard of IDEs (I laugh when the poor Sql Developer guys show me a feature I got back in 2002). This is the first one that left me with a look on my face that should belong to somebody that just watched a mother peel the **** off a toddler's face after a good sneeze.
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Ashley
commented
MS is simply pretending we are all resistant to change. Its not something they can possibly know. Its insulting and bullying. We simply don't exist to them in a real way.
The scientific world justifies actions with research into what works best for us. MS just has a ridiculous agenda and is prepared to talk nonsense.
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exalting
commented
Maybe cause of all this f****try with monochrome indistinguishable icons is - that ms developers unlearned how to correctly show images? In WPF when image scaled or just shifted on non-integer quantity of pixels, it looks blurry (try scroll horizontally some VS toolwindows with wpf trees, and you'll see this effect). Maybe monochrome icons "invented" because of incapability to show crisp images? (With monochrome it is not such noticeable).
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brian
commented
This is so like the 'New Coke' disaster - the only difference is that Coca-Cola was listening and fixed it!
As for Doug Tunure Visual Studio PM - try taking the cotton wool out of your ears - your customer are complaining, and they don't want to try and fix your 'New coke' they want the classic coke back
Is that really so hard for you to understand? Or maybe you need to follow in the footsteps of the person responsible for the disaster that is Windows 8?
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Ryan Johnson
commented
The color theme editor help a bit, but a huge part of this issue is missing the borders/boundaries of controls in the IDE, and changing colors doesn't bring those back. For example, changing colors does not help me see the camouflage scroll box in the scroll bar, changing colors does not delineate the text across my document well (there are actually tabs there, but it just looks like one long string of text), and changing colors does not keep my empty project space from bleeding into embedded window borders. It's like someone erased all my lines that organized my tools into boxes, much like when my little kids dump all their toys out of boxes onto the floor, and there's utter disorganization.
As others have mentioned, the font colors are also missing, and the color theme editor does not bring those back. Are they trying to make it hard to recognize the tools? I have to hand it to the designer of the icons, because it sounds like a difficult task to make a whole new set of icons using just one color, however it was a task that should have never been assigned. Let's take advantage of the color palette, and make it easier to use the IDE.
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ganimet
commented
the mere number of votes - compared to those given to other topics - tells me that the vast majority of people using visual studio seems to be deeply disgusted by how some color-blind untalented designer f*****ed up the almost perfect userinterfacedesign of visual studio, and the only solution coming from MS is that each single customer should repair that disaster manually on his own ?? must be kidding right....
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Marcel
commented
I work on win8 with .net 2012, not really happy but after installing the bluetheme I was satisfied, I thought I could work again like before...
Like I said : I thought...
Until this weekend : I had to take over from a co-worker who's using win7 and 2010. Damned, did forget those colors (and the not-metrostyle) make such a difference in working-speed.
Now I'm sitting back on my own desk, feeling f**-up working on metro and 2012 again, thinking how to explain my boss I do have to get win7 AND .net 2010 back... -
Anonymous
commented
Please make 2012 to look like 2010 - and reduce memory usage.
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KrojerT
commented
Please make 2012 to look like 2010 - and reduce memory usage.
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Kris Sweeney
commented
The only reason I use VS2012 is to edit XAML, and this is only because I am unable to purchase a new copy of Expression Blend 4 and in MS wisdom, I could only install my original copy TWICE (once following purchase and the second following a hardware upgrade).
Yes that is with the 3rd party Icon fix removal of the SHOUTY MENU and 'blue' colour scheme.
Absolutely everything else I write for windows is written using VS2010 or Notepad++ on a machine running Windows 7 Ultimate!
I have used every version of VS since 6.0 and I want my friendly, usable Visual Studio with ALL of its easily identifiable icons back!
If anyone from MS is reading (which i doubt) trying to force people that actually bring value to your OS by writing software for your OS (users purchase an OS to run applications on) to use a visually crippled development environment is bizarre even by MS standards...
TIFKAM is great for tablets, passable and even an understandable choice to simplify web pages but turning your back on years of user focussed changes to try to strip all colours and definition from your development environment in a homage to a hated OS change is bizarre.
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Dave Cousineau
commented
The theme editor does not fix the icons, which of all the horrible UI changes, are easily the worst.
The problem is not necessarily that VS2012 was made "metro" (which is stupid enough already), but that whoever metro-ized it didn't know what the heck they were doing. "Metro" is ugly and annoying, but it's still relatively usable when implemented properly. This very webpage is metro-ized, but the colors were chosen intelligently and nothing is particularly hard to visually understand.
In contrast, the VS2012 UI has been utterly destroyed by bad choice of color. The themes editor helps somewhat, but the icons are still ruined. Icons function by shape and color, each of which reinforces the other. You have literally crippled them by taking away their color.
I want to enjoy using VS2012, and I might have even bought myself a copy by now, but I will not be buying it until I hear that MS has fixed the icons. I can't believe it's been over a YEAR now, and something that should be trivial to correct is still this broken. smh
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abatishchev commented
>I just find it stupid that people are still whining about the UI and I find it worrying that this is actually the 'biggest suggestion' on here, over all the wonderful other ideas which would help enormously. Makes it seem like people prefer eye-candy over productivity
********. UI ergonomics IS about productivity. Especially if you spend 7 hours a day, 5 days a week looking into this UI.
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Anonymous
commented
@Anon - with all due respect to your position on this, I think you're missing our/the point. This is part of a larger rejection of the direction Microsoft has taken. There's serious work going on in many industries to improve the availability and the security of data. No one I have ever been in contact with said "hey I think the Windows desktop stinks, wouldn’t it be great if they would deprecate 4 decades of hard work and change it into a consumer oriented toy”?
I work in health care. Our top concerns are security and data integrity. Touch screen operating systems are not on the list. As a matter of fact, the more changes they make the more vulnerable your data becomes due to unknown security issues and the inherent lack of familiarity with the operation of a new OS. The changes they are making to their eco-system are not trivial – nor are they popular.The developer community was very actively involved in this recent tools release. We applauded almost everything they were doing until we saw the new interface. This thread represents the development community’s response to the change.
What you really should be upset about is the company who makes the tools you use every day to earn a living is not listening to you. They asked for feedback and ignored it. Where does this end? How far are they willing to take this and what impact will it have on your ability to provide for yourself?
It’s up to you, but personally I would pay more attention the lack of concern for the development community who helped build Microsoft.
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Andrew McDonald
commented
"Just remember when XP came out it received just as many complaints as Win7 / Win8 did on the UI, it is like you people have amnesia."
I don't remember that. Such protests would have made no sense anyway because in both Windows XP & Vista/7 you could switch back to a classic interface style that looked identical to previous versions of Windows. The complaint here was that the old familiar interface style of VS was completely removed.
"When Win8 was in dev preview, where were the mass protests? When VS changed the UI from the previous one, where was the mass protests?"
Uh... they were here? You're in one right now. This particular topic was opened just weeks after the Beta build was released. The previous Developer Preview build had the VS2010 interface.
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Anon
commented
It isn't a flamewar it is a sheer frustration that people in this thread are still complaining despite the fact that a 'solution' (although I feel unnecessary) was provided months ago. I mean what more do people want, if you read posts before me, it is nothing but the same criticism you here over and over.
Surely you can understand why people like me have decided to react. Oh and my SQL Server remark wasn't relating to actual problems on SQL Server but that most (if not all) keywords in T-SQL are in caps.
I just find it stupid that people are still whining about the UI and I find it worrying that this is actually the 'biggest suggestion' on here, over all the wonderful other ideas which would help enormously. Makes it seem like people prefer eye-candy over productivity
