Splitting Hairs
Jeff Dlouhy - Tuesday, June 05, 2007 at 01:09 AM
I think when I start getting distracted by buttons being slightly a different color from one another, that I have had one too many coffees. In the past few days I have been brushing up on my Quartz as well as getting my Tabposé view displaying in the browser as my mentor Stuart suggested.
Nearing the end of my coding for the night I started to notice that some of the buttons in the BrowserTabView were slightly different shades of grey. I would think that since the buttons are “etched” into the same bar that they would be the same color. The different colors might be on purpose or it’s such a minuscule difference that it doesn’t matter (thats my bet 
).
I know I am totally splitting hairs and that the images were probably made at different times by different people. Just for fun, here are the values of the different buttons which I attained with DigitalColor Meter:
Overflow Arrow (disabled)
- R - 36237
- G - 36237
- B - 36237
Down Arrow
- R - 30326
- G - 30326
- B - 30326
Close Button
- R - 44461
- G - 44461
- B - 44461
I know. I need a life…
Andrew says:
June 7th, 2007 at 8:03 pmThere are differences, yes, but they are not mistakes. Human visual perception interprets the same color differently depending on which color it’s adjacent to, and also depending on the amount of other colors near it. So the middle gray--in the downward double chevron icon--needs to be darker so that it “reads” correctly. Since it’s inside a small shape, that gray would sort of bleed into the background if it were the same value as the gray in your third example. There--the x in the circle--you’re looking a physically bigger object, and one with more continuous color. The gray there needs to be lighter so that it “reads” correctly. When seen at the correct size, at a distance, these different tones will actually appear nearly the same.
Here’s a demonstration of this effect:
http://acc4.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~lscarlat/GUI/ColorPerception/c1.html
Jeff Dlouhy says:
June 7th, 2007 at 8:12 pmAndrew, Thanks for the insight! That makes a lot more sense now.
Smokey Ardisson says:
June 5th, 2007 at 5:52 amThe fact that you noticed those color differences is the sign you’re truly a perfect match for Camino…just ask Wevah about his favorite off-by-one-pixel bugs!