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Designing for the notes client? The peril of using color gradients in tables.

This is a little one but it is in fact really annoying.
Did you ever try to use color gradients as a background for your notes tables? You know that you can do this don’t you?
OK if you know how to use it and have been coming across the problem which lies in using this you do not have to read further on.
For the rest of you read more.

You would like to build a little table that blends smoothly into you background, whatever it is?
Something like this?
Example for Table colors
I know that this does not look good but hey i’m not an artist.

So you can use this one here …
Using Color and To in a table
from left to right up to down and the other way round …
Or this one here …
System and color does also work
Which uses the system color and this “(system)” can also be used as “color” or as “to”.
And there is a third one named “(none)” which can be used to achieve transparency and which you will sometimes perhaps find useful …
(none) and Color does work too
But this one behaves different.
If your are building a gradient you can use it as a “color” but not as “to” on both left to right and top to bottom gradients. Because every time you try to use the “(none)” as the gradients target you will end up this way.
That is where you will always end

Tested with 8.5.1 not yet tested with other versions of the designer.

Sigh.

And yes i know that i could achieve the same thing with transparent Gifs as Cell images. But if i have the option of using colors the direct way, then i would like to make FULL use of them.

This entry was posted on Mittwoch, Juli 7th, 2010 at 16:36 and is filed under Allgemein, Funktion, Notes 8.5. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Designing for the notes client? The peril of using color gradients in tables.”

  1. Maria Helm Says:
    Juli 8th, 2010 at 14:27

    There is another reason to use the background images. Sometimes the gradients do not display well on screens with certain color depths. For instance, we have a limited color depth in our Citrix environment, and the gradients that look fine on my PC look horrible on our thin clients.

    But, in my experience at least, we’ve always gotten a consistent result with the background-image-as-gradient method.

  2. Thomas Schulte Says:
    Juli 8th, 2010 at 17:19

    Well that is one of the reasons why they are called “thin clients”. :-)
    But why are background images working when you have limited the color depth?

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