Well Howdy Y’all. This is a special Texas post. That’s because I am actually in the Lone Star state for a few days visiting family. I’m still going to try and get my daily posts in but they might be a bit shorter for the next few days. But enough about that.
Yesterday I was reading John Nack’s special guest post over at Photoshop Insider and while he was talking about all of the reasons why Adobe develops the features that get put into new versions of Photoshop, he mentioned something that caught my eye. John was making reference to Matt Kloskowski’s suggestion of semi-translucent dialog boxes. John’s opinion was pretty straightforward when he said “I think translucent interface elements generally suck: they make it harder to see both what you’re adjusting and the controls for adjusting it”.
That got me to thinking though and I have to admit that semi-translucent boxes are a pain… but what about transparent dialogs?
So here is my idea, when you have your cursor on top of a dialog box, it appears normal (see below).
If you want to see the image behind it, just move your mouse cursor off of the dialog box and it becomes transparent, yet still shows the pertinent information.
Just move the mouse back on the box and it’s back to normal again. This would probably never work and I can’t think of a program out there that uses anything remotely like this but I figured if everyone else was throwing out their ideas for the new Photoshop, why not me.
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Jeff, i think this is a great idea!!