[ui-best-practices-working-group] form toolkit look and feel

[Eugene Kuleshov <eu@xxxxxxxx>]

 It would be interesting to hear opinion of the UI working group 
members about Forms Toolkit look and feel. There are somehow abstract 
guidelines about using and applicability of the Forms Toolkit in the 
Eclipse UI guidelines and perhaps those need to be clarified. It is 
actually been brought up by one of the users, but I don't want to link 
that discussion here because it been somehow heated. Since reporter 
stated that he won't be bringing it to the UI group attention, I am 
taking the liberty to do so in a hope that I will be able to reflect his 
concerns.

 So, the complain was about the flattenes of the UI based on the Forms 
Toolkit and that it looks quite alien on Mac OS X (flat square buttons 
vs. Mac's roundish fancy buttons). Then reporter evolved his own theory 
that it is ok to have flat buttons in some cases (like editing 
properties), but it is not ok to use those flat buttons if they somehow 
related to actions on the data behind given form. He used Mylyn's Task 
Editor as example and demanded "Submit" button to be made non-flat for 
this reason and after that tried to generalize the use case around 
action-related buttons.

 While Submit button in Mylyn's Task Editor has other issues (not 
really related to this topic, and Mik might be talking about that on one 
of the meetings), my interpretation of Forms Toolkit guidelines is that 
all widgets inside the same form should be using consistent look, 
regardless of their actions, hence the whole issue of "weird-looking" 
buttons on Mac OS X need to be addressed globally, so all buttons should 
look consistent, and rendered consistently with the platform UI (even 
when using SWT.FLAT flag).

 What do you think?

 regards,
 Eugene