Hi,

Not strictly FPC related, but I know here are some OS/2 software developers around - and I have no idea where else to ask.

I'm working on supporting OS/2 in fpGUI Toolkit and creating OS/2 themes. Looking at some of the OS/2 screenshots I have collected, I noticed that in the same dialog you sometimes have blue text and sometimes black text. Anybody know why, and what is the difference between the two (other than the color alone)?

Here is an example:

http://geldenhuys.co.uk/~graemeg/os2_screenshot.png

The only pattern I can see is that "static text" (eg: labels and groupbox captions) use the blue text, but Checkboxes, Buttons, Menu Items etc use the black text. I still don't understand IBM's reasoning behind this though - but would like to know out of curiosity.

Regards,
Graeme

On Thu, July 20, 2017 12:00, Graeme Geldenhuys wrote:

Hi Graeme,

I'm on holiday at the moment and thus nowhere close to my OS/2 machine (or any other PC, in fact). Moreover, I haven't studied the IBM GUI recommendations, nor analyzed the implementation from this point of view. Your observation looks correct to me (descriptions in blue and values in black). However, I'd like to remind you that standard OS/2 dialogues may be modified using the Font Palette, Color Palette, etc., using drag and drop, and thus this pattern may change easily - that part may be actually more important than the default setup if you intend to provide OS/2 native behaviour to your fpGUI port.

Tomas

i'd like to re-enforce this statement about the colorings... on all our OS/2 systems, one of the first things we do is to change the color text of "original" icons to RED so that they stand out and it is patently signaled that removing this one means trouble to recreate it if needed in the future... "clones" of icons have their text GREEN so signal that they can be removed if desired and that they can easily be "re-cloned" in the future if needed... that's probably the main coloration changes we make... aside from that, users can set whatever they desire, for the most part...

Tomas Hajny wrote

However, I'd like to remind you that standard OS/2 dialogues may be modified using the Font Palette, Color Palette, etc., using drag and drop

And and awesome feature it is - which I used frequently when still used OS/2. The drag-n-drop ability of most (if not all) OS/2 applications were just awesome! No other OS came close.

Regards,
Graeme