764348 - More contrasting color for yellow star (starred messages)

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Theme, enhancement)

Description

[Pander]

Attachment: star.png

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:13.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/13.0
Build ID: 20120601175215

Steps to reproduce:

Star a message.


Actual results:

The message gets a yellow star icon in the star column but the star is not easily visible since it has low contrast with the background colors and with greyed out unset stars, see screenshot. When other default colors are used to label messages, see screenshot, the effect is even worse.


Expected results:

Perhaps for many users a yellow star is sufficient, especially when no other colors are being used. Users that do desire a star with a more contrasting color should be able to select another star icon from a limited set of star icons in the preferences.

Offering star icons with the following colors: yellow FFFF00 (default), orange FF8800, red FF0000, magenta FF00FF, purple 8800ff, blue 0000FF en enables the user to have stars have high contrast with the background. This also applies to stars displayed in the message header.

PS   Note that the user should be able to choose only one star color and the star icons are ready shipped and not generated on demand.

Comment 1

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

I would be ok with changing the color of the star, since yellow on white is a bit hard to read. I'm not ok with creating a UI for selecting star colors as part of core Thunderbird.

Comment 2

[Pander]

Attachment: Current use of star icons

That is also fine with me. Perhaps make the star a bit more orange. For example, the start used in the header of a message has already more contrast than the star used in the message list and the star used in the quick filter bar at the top of the window.

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

FTR: Bug 558519 is about another star which is also too faint, for newly arrived email.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Attachment: screen shot of stars in message list

Bug 558519 is about "starburst". And I think it's principal problem is the burst is too small to be obvious.

In this bug, a different star, I am not sure whether "the color" itself needs to change - 

a) star in reporter's screen shot looks more faint than mine (a large display at 1680x1050 - attached), so does reporter have a slight problem with the display?  Is reporter affected by screen resolution?  

b) regardless, it should be better out of the box. One problem is the gradient - the star gets lighter/whiter in the upper half. In fact very few pixels have the dark yellow. So make it a more uniform color and perhaps we fix the issue? Make the star bigger and there would be less of an issue.

Comment 5

[Devika Sugathan]

Hello,
I would like to work on this bug, Please guide me in how to proceed.

Comment 6

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Devika, thank you for the interest.

Have you already self built TB? If not look at https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_guide/Build_Instructions/Simple_Thunderbird_build on how to build.

If you have done it, ask if you need more info.

Comment 7

[Devika Sugathan]

I have built TB. Should I make some changes in messageIcons.css file?

Comment 8

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

Yes, it would be in messageIcons.css. But I think this is more of a exchange the icon in message-list.png with the faint colours with an icon from osx (threadpane-col.png) or windows (flag-col.png) with better colours.

Comment 9

[Richard Marti (:Paenglab)]

This should be fixed with the SVG icons.