Max 7 Color Scheme
I'm not crazy about the readability of the dark grey box/white text, just like books aren't printed this way because it negatively affects readability.
Is there going to be a white box/black text or other color scheme preference in Max 7? I really hope so!
Bullshit, there is no officially scientific-proven reasoning
Bauer and Cavonius (1980) found that participants were 26% more accurate in reading text when they read it with dark characters on a light background.
Reference: Bauer, D., & Cavonius, C., R. (1980). Improving the legibility of visual display units through contrast reversal. In E. Grandjean, E. Vigliani (Eds.), Ergonomic Aspects of Visual Display Terminals (pp. 137-142). London: Taylor & Francis
People with astigmatism (aproximately 50% of the population) find it harder to read white text on black than black text on white. Part of this has to do with light levels: with a bright display (white background) the iris closes a bit more, decreasing the effect of the “deformed” lens; with a dark display (black background) the iris opens to receive more light and the deformation of the lens creates a much fuzzier focus at the eye.
Jason Harrison – Post Doctoral Fellow, Imager Lab Manager – Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group, University of British Columbia
CONSTANTLY SURROUNDED MORE AND MORE BY COLOR HERE ON EARTH
Sorry, but dark grey isn't a color. :)
Ipads and kindles have this option because it saves power if you inverse it. I agree with Wade here, the images already appear "noisy" to my eyes and i cant imagine how it'll be after hours of patching. Good thing max has the option to customize the colorscheme so i wont expect it to be a problem.
Go home Raja you're drunk ;p
My father was a well known researcher in visual sensitivity while he lived.(H.D. Baker). several APA (American Psychology Association) meetings were organized around his pioneering (1950's) research in visual sensitivity and color vision. He told me , *years* ago, before the formal 1980's results quoted above that it was "well known" to researchers that white text on black was inferior to black on white for perception, in almost all people. He told my friend S. Gooch, a networking engineer at Apple (went there in late 70's - early 80's, fresh out of Atari's first bloom...) about this fact : it was shared with the Apple interface group, which was defining the Apple Macintosh at the time : they were considering white text. They called him for several phone conferences, then they dropped the white text, at my father's recommendation... and later sent him as reward engineering swag from Cuppertino... he was so proud: my brother still has the baseball cap...with a Motorola machine instruction (PUSHD ?) on it.
Fondly remembering my emeritus father...
Charlie Baker (PhD UCSB 94)
PS: And white text is clearly for the more irrational sorts... ;-). And go ahead and Rave on!, our beloved irrational folk...
I also think that the normal colorscheme is a bit more clear, but I really love the look of max 7. I'm sure you will be able to change colorsettings in the menus.
Raja's rants = awesome.
Nuff said.
Seems to be a move to look more like other pro software, i.e. Logic and Final Cut. In this regard, I love it.
There's also some minor tweaks... Object boxes lose the round corners, and message objects have less round corners. This also looks more "professional" to me (round=bubbly). Objects borders only run along top and bottom, which may look bad with custom colors (i.e. when just changing the border color, as opposed to having a whole new color scheme).Iinlets/outlets indicate that they've got patch cords connected or not which is kinda nice (though not really that useful since the cable itself is a sufficient indicator), but with this color scheme it seems harder to see them altogether. Message objects aren't as easy to distinguish from regular objects, which does make the over patch look more cohesive I guess (though inlet/outlets don't seem to be visible).
Overall, it looks sexy, but I'd have to work with it for a while to see if the readability (of the text, and of the patching issues I've mentioned) is as much of an issue as I think it might be.
I think it's funny the way the 2 color schemes are compared in the pictures above: one is a low resolution screenshot from a video, the other one crystal-clear from Max 6 :)
@N871: True enough. Try not to focus on the blurriness levels. ;)
@RAJA the self-described 'Asswipe':
Your post is a great attempt at intelligent, self-directed thought, but personally I don't NEED Scientific PROOF to back up my claims.
I personally know it's harder to read because I have eyes and I have preferences. If you enjoy dark-grey with white text, and that somehow feeds your creativity and your love of all cultures, excellent.
I just want to create amazing patches, and I want as little friction as possible. Sometimes black text on white is nice, other times dark-grey may be nice too, depending on the lighting, etc.
I just hope it's customizable in the Preferences so we can celebrate our love of pink, yellow, and brown with white people, I mean text. In Max 7.
Maybe you guys will be able to create exactly whatever colour schemes for your patchers you like in Max 7 and this whole discussion will be moot?
-A
Andrew, you're mostly right :) But there are two small issues here:
1) since the border of regular objects don't go entirely around the object, changing the colour will (i'm assuming) result in two coloured bars (top & bottom of object), which I imagine would look less neat than the current single wrap around border. I'm predicting that I'd now be more inclined to change the 'fill' colour instead (which I currently prefer not to, personal taste of course).
2) current patches with custom colouring may look really bad when mixed with this new scheme (like how patches made in pre-Max5 tend to look weird). Hopefully there will be an easy way to resolve this that doesn't entail manually recoloring objects.
and not wasting time starting stupid-ass threads like these
For someone who claims to not be wasting any time, you sure spent a lot of time writing 2000+ character replies.
"this is still not what is known as widely-accepted ‘scientific proof’."
i believe this is not what the OP was talking about.
his point has some validity even if this was only his personal experience with the reading speed of certain graphical schemes.
as a general rule you can say that the more graphical elements are on a wall, the slower is the reading speed for a certain element.
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for example, you an read text best, when there is a lot of emtpy space around it
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if you dont think color or luminance make a difference, try reading pink text on grey background.
this combination is known as the worst, it is even worse readable then complementary colors.
and you probably also know that if contrast is too low, like white elements on white background, you can no longer see it.
so to sum it up, everything matters for the reading speed, colors, luminance, contrast, and the surrounding area / other elements.
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at which side do people look first when there is a yin and yang symbol?
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-110
hey, as long as the round corners are gone, everything is ok.
and in case one day your monitor will remain black, dont be afraid: i will always be with you.
-110
I have no opinion on this matter.
That being said, this is some mighty fine morning reading.
Time to go write code with light text on a dark background.
Can't wait for 7.
i say the corners arent near un-rounded enough. im waiting till max 8 when every object will have corners festooned with razor-sharp jags and the colors of the UI will react to my mood.
white-Americans, you can smell their idiocy a mile away
Well that was unexpected…
You need(perhaps even deserve) to feel like your life is in danger in order to realize how frivolous it is to worry about colorschemes and round corners. That is where my service to humanity comes in ;)
I'm Texan. Try harder. ;-)
(But I also agree with the sentiment)
how I can be so sure that Wade is a white-american
Actually, I'm not American. Have a nice day.
Kinell M8, are you going under again?
HOIST THE COLORS!!!!!!!
color distracts eye: make it completely monochromatic, please.
I hope this hasn't already been mentioned (haven't read every post in this thread in detail), but I would really like to be able to have as default (and of course changeable) behaviour is a default colour-scheme based on classes of objects.
So for instance, when I've finished a sub-patch in Max 6, I normally spend an extra bit of time selecting and then changing all my send and receive objects to have a light green edge. Any trigger objects I make light grey inside. Any js objects have an orange edge with a bold font, and likewise mxj have a red edge. This aids greatly in the readability of patches when i need to modify them or work out what's going on if debugging is required.
Sometimes, for tricky-to-follow patches, I change the colour of patch cords too, in the same way signal~, opengl, and jit.matrix transmissions are differentiated. For example, any cord that transmits a bang is made blue. Any feedback path is red. Lists are green, scalars are dark-grey.
It would be really great if these object-specific colour schemes could be persistent, so as soon as I make a trigger object (or any object that I've specified to have a certain colour-set and font), it would just 'be' like that. Same with patch cords.
Feature request uncle 74. If you can do bouncy patch cords, surely this would be a walk in the park, a snack, a piece of cake...
^ Try the object prototypes feature.
I Have to vehemently disagree with Floating Points' request: I can think of no more silly a waste of my machine's cycles than calculating virtual patch cord physics in real time for 'bouncy' patch cords. I Thought it was immensely stupid in Reason and the Arturia synths, and it would be doubly so In Max. If they do it, they would be idiots to not allow it to be toggled off, which I would do without fail. What earthly good does this annoying "eye-candy" bring to the editing process?!? Ok, nothing personal , I just do not see bouncy cords as anything but vain, overly 'precious', annoying, and useless.
Just my opinion, but do try to sell us this waste of calculation: I've yet to see a single rational reason for the waste.
Not trolling, it's my honest, long held opinion... Pax!
Charlie
Hey dude I never requested bouncy patch cords-- I think they're silly too. I was referring to the fact they've already been incorporated into max 7 as per demo video, and if they can do that surely they can do other more pressing stuff. If you read my post again you'll see I'm talking about object preference flexibility...
Apologies! I was scanning after spending all night supervising rebuild of my employers' server clusters: I am still out of it, barely there... And I agree with your perfectly rational request for consistent persistence of object display defaults! Sheesh, wish my music time wasn't delegated to the odd-hour, tired, overworked part of my life. Apologies, again.
lol
I like roman, but in this specific thread don’t care about what he has to say, so I find his name(made extra easy by looking for the color scheme of his 110-modular avatar) and immediately gloss over his entire post. I didn’t even bother readin it, and therefore don’t need to address him or quote him, or deal directly with him at all.
Hey Stringtapper that's good to know but not exactly what I was meaning-- you still have to manually choose the prototype for each individual object. it would be great if the max environment would automatically conform any particular "class" of non-UI object to a prototype according to a predetermined prototype specification. So if I type in [send~ mySignal] it would automatically have the object take on the font & colour scheme of the "send~/receive~" class of objects, without me having to manually choose a prototype. Examples of other classes would be the zl range of objects, simple arithmetic operator objects, jitter objects, etc (also user-defined classes)
what floating point wants I also want
and it should not be called "prototype", that is a weird name for that.
so, can people with astigmatism change the color scheme - or do we have to change one object at a time? I can't perform guessing what is happening....
instead of the patch bounce i'd like to see more of a lasso effect. so how do u change the colors?