On Tuesday, 27 April 2021 at 09:33:44 UTC+1 weanti wrote:
On the plus side this flat style (available in win10 and maybe win8) is looking nice and clean. On the other hand these flat UIs have the downside that you can't tell what's a button, what's a menu and what's a label or just a background. You can hardly tell them apart. Sometimes it's even hard to tell with hovering your mouse over them, because the highlight coloring is also not that different from normal coloring.
With proper/stronger coloring I think a "flat" FLTK UI can be way better than any default win10 UI.
There's a related problem with touchscreen devices, too: If you are using a mouse, you get enter/leave events you can use to change the button colour, cueing the user that there's an active region there.
On a touchscreen, there generally are no enter/leave events, as touchscreen interactions typically do not work like that.
So how do you cue the user in that case?
It needs to be a static colour difference that is "always" present, but a surprising number of implementations seem to have forgotten that.
Style over function, I fear...
Anyway, returning to the original question, a flat style is actually pretty easy to make in fltk since the stock widgets all support a FL_FLAT_BOX style. If the UI is reasonably simple it is easy to set all the widgets box styles to flat and set "sensible" colours (for some value of sensible) and that's about it...
