618490 - Personas custom, easy color pickers to avoid ugliness

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Mozilla Labs Graveyard :: Personas Plus, defect)

Description

[Maciej Jaros]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pl; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; pl; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101203 Firefox/3.6.13 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Hi. I'm sure you are a aware of a problem with Personas and the Sidebar (AIOS). If you don't have a look at this screenshot:
https://forums.mozilla.org/addons/viewtopic.php?t=497

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
You can choose the background - great, but there are several problems with it:
Actual Results:  
1. Authors of personas obviously don't understand the need of choosing the correct background (most personas I checked have pretty much random background).
2. Authors are not really able to finetune the background even if they would want to.
3. Users are not able to quickly change/finetune the background.

Expected Results:  
1. In guides about creating personas (and in the personas extension) you should suggest that one should use a color as close to the header image color as possible. You should start by changing the label "Accent color" to "Background color".
2. You should add the ability to choose many different colors not just from those few available. After a lot of frustrations I figured how to use Firebug to tweak the color as needed. I think the color picker should look like more like the Firepicker. Authors can really finetune the color if it will change dynamically. At a very least one should be able to change the color by typing in the value (on should be able to do that in any case as it is the best way to choose exactly the same color as the header bottom color).
3. Finally I think end-users should be able to choose a background color more quikly (without installing additional extensions). One could simply choose this from normal settings which (without any personas picture in the background) would simply change the overall background of bars. Again a decent color picker or at least ability to use an external color picker (i.e. paste color value) would be highly recommended (by me at least ;-)).

Firepicker website:
http://thedarkone.github.com/firepicker/

To does striving with a similar color tuning problem:
1. Firstly you need Firebug and Personas extensions.
2. Open chrome://personas/content/customPersonaEditor.xul
3. Change the "color" attribute of accentColorPicker (in HTML tab of FB).
4. Run (in console): CustomPersonaEditor.onChangeAccentColor()