Well i’ve got to say it - the icons sizes suck. Weey too small.
dropping & moving folders / cards and documents in binder can cause repeated accidental selection of item name .
Also creating sub-items thro drag and drop doesnt always work and it can be hard to understand why without stopping and squinting very hard at such tiny icons to understand what status it is in and why it didnt accept a sub document.
Much the same for hitting the small shortcut icons at both the bottom left and right of GUI. It’s so easy when in mid flow of writing to miss such small icons and then you have to break concentration to aim the cursor exactly on the icon youre aiming for.
If youre eye site makes things smaller the closer they are - these functions of this application are no use what so ever and in fact is a distraction.
THATS A SHAME because from what i hear from the mac version, icons play an increasingly useful role in scrivener. Also to say that icons are useful and i do like the idea. All this could be addressed if you allowed the GUI to set different size of the icons as you have done with the font in the function panels. This also does, strictly speaking, mirror the fact that different icon sizes are available in windows OS and you are aiming to mirror windows are you not ?
I would say that the icons for Scrivener are on a par with other applications. If you compare the binder icons on the left with, say Windows Explorer they are identically sized. And given that there are really only two main icons used here on the Windows version, they really are easy to distinguish - if only by colour.
Where the icon picture itself is more a visual reminder of function - ie at the top of the Scrivener window - these icons are huge. Just compare them to “industry standard” MS Word.
Have a look at the attached picture… the main window is Scrivener, the window on the left is a Windows folder, and the bit peaking through on the top left is good ol’ MS Word.
Also, are you using the latest version of the beta? On v46, Lee has made moving files in binder really easy.
the new beta has fixed the issue of drag and dropping files in the binder cleanly.
I don’t understand what it is you want me to ‘see’ in the images you provided.
So LETS LOOK AGAIN TOGETHER AT THOSE ICONS IN THE IMAGE BELOW:
In the image BELOW, Scrivener Binder’s blue and white Binder icons on left - Windows 7 Finder’s Organise pane’s smallest icons on right and Word 2010 icons running below.
This is what i see:
To note that Windows Finder icons within the adjacent Search pane but not shown has 8 different information viewing options including 4 icons sizes. But as you are equating the Scrivener Binder with Window’s Finder’s Organise pane, i only show a comparison to this. Even then, Scrivener Binder icons are minimum of 20% smaller than the smallest of Window’s 7 Finder’s organise pane’s fixed icon size using mm as measurement. In some cases the scrivener binder icons are up to 35% maybe 40% smaller than other Window’s Finder’s Organise pane icons, such as the desktop icon shown.
Scrivener binder icons are only the same size as Word 2010 icons which don’t contain additional information that changes. Word’s 2010 icons which contains additional information that changes are 50% bigger than scrivener binder icons. As virtually all of scrivener’s binder icons can contain additional information that changes, this means that in reality, scrivener binder icons are 50% smaller than word 2010 icons with similar level of complexity.
This is an important point, so we need to agree that we are seeing the same thing and also verifying the issue on our respective pcs correctly.
I understand you are following the logic of synthesising the GUI for Scrivener for Windows so it matches windows in look and feel but i also think that scrivener is to a large extent, a specific and self enclosed working environment with it’s own unique user group needs.
Writers have to look after their eye sight and i expect a software application to allow me to be able to write as i age and my site deteriorates. Heavy reliance on information-based complex icons which are too small cease to aid the preservation of site. Consequently, as one spends years with the software, it becomes impossible to build reliance on these tiny icons within any workflow due to eye strain and potential eye damage.
A writer needs to look after their eyes. Eye deteriation will most probably effect the entire of your long term user group as they approach middle age. So your current design objectives are not only being myopic prejudice but also ageist. You need to look after your user’s optical health for an average creative period of more than 60 years and this imperative should lead your design logic over and above just imitating some characteristic of the windows OS.
So again, please, i ask you to re-consider the way you are approaching design decisions for Scrivener for Windows.
I’m not part of the L&L team - just a forum member looking to understand your query.
I agree with you that writers should look after their eyes. We can probably go one further and say that it’s probably not a good idea for anyone to damage their eyes.
As a Windows XP user, Scriv is bang on the money for icon size. It matches standards for other programs. If I need to make things larger because of my personal eyesight limitations, I can do that through system settings by changing the screen resolution.
As a Windows 7 user, you have some MASSIVE icons there. I mean huge. Blimey, how do you find room to fit other things on the screen?
I’m not sure what you mean by the level of info displayed on a changing basis in the binder icons. You have folders and text docs. Lines are added if they have text in them. On the picture you have attached, these are all clearly differentiated at a glance.
I have to say, the MS Word picture you show there has much larger menu text and icons than my version. Do you know if MS updated this in hte latest version?
But, I will concur - looking after your eyes is important. But between setting the Editor view magnification, screen resolution and brightness - not to mention the old standby of regular breaks from the monitor - you have plenty of ways to mitigate the potential eyestrain.
From a personal perspective I’d be upset if the icons were larger as they’d eat into the space for the editor etc (with an exagerated impact on a small ultraportable). So if Lee and Co were looking to change this, I’d urge them to consider a “magnification” slider rather than just increasing the icons.
I agree - icon sizes should be able to change not be fixed to one size which is not what i am asking.
I mean by icons whose information changes, where for example a synopsis card icon can be blank and have writing indicated and then also transform into a text file icon. At the current size these kinds of differences are impossible foe me to keep track off visually without disrupting concentration on writing. I simply cannot see the difference between a synopsis card icon indicated with writing or blank.
The image i provide has no icons enlarged. The Windows Finder Organise pane icons shown cannot have their size altered. You can verify Word 2010 icon sizes by downloading a word 2010 document from the web or i can post one here.
Personally i feel that changing the screen res because a software designer cant cope with accommodating this issue is not only inelegant but it fails to address the question of at what point a size starts to be too small for someone’s eye sight. It also means all the other settings in scrivener become ‘untrue’ to themselves for the sake of the one which becomes true but where it is possible to design them to work together and provide total flexibility for the user…
4.There is a danger of appearing to assume that tiny is ‘normal’ sight and everybody else is ‘abnormal’. This is incorrect. Eye sight moves from extreme long sightedness, through to extreme near sightedness and everything in between. The preferences for tiny actually reflect the eye sight of the designer’s more near-sighted vision as well as perhaps their age.
You express satisfaction concerning icon sizes for your own eyes. This suggests you have a tendancy to near sighted vision. Wikipedia suggests that this affects 50% of people in Europe. However you fail to imagine that for many others who are far sighted in orientation, this may not be the case, A position i seek to represent. So for example, the windows folders you have in your own image are too small for my eyes.
See hxxp://www.rightdiagnosis.com/h/hyperop … ountry.htm for stats for each country.
Let me apologist: I wasn’t trying to suggest you had altered the screenshots, although retracing my post it does read that way. What I was trying (and failing) to do was just draw attention to the clear sizing increase MS has done on Word.
I don’t think, however, that because I’m okay with the current icon sizes that I must be near sighted. I could also have eyesight that needs no or minimal correction.
But I do acknowledge that far sighted people might have problems. Rather than changing the software, I’d look to more systematic changes, such as screen resolution or the other visibility assistance offered by your operating system.
My new 30" iMac is wonderful in many ways, but the higher screen resolution makes both icons and text smaller. Readability went down sharply, even though my own vision (near-sighted) did not change. Increasing the screen resolution decreases the effective screen real estate, which of course was the reason why I bought a 30" iMac in the first place. Same thing with the vision assistance tools.
My preferred solution – like the OPs – would have been to nudge the icon and font size up by a few points. That isn’t an option under OS X, but is (or used to be) a system-level option in Windows. Windows’ own icons will resize cleanly, and so for a user to expect program icons to do so is completely reasonable. (Apple’s insistence on a uniform, minimally customizable look is very annoying in some situations. This is one of them.)
The option I chose was to get a pair of computer glasses: same idea as reading glasses, but optimized for the distance from head to screen instead of head to page.
As screen resolution continues to improve and the population ages, I expect this is going to be more and more of an issue. 20-30 year-old programmers naturally want all the screen resolution they can get. But at a certain point – which changes from person to person and over time – things are simply too small to see. A software solution is likely to be far more popular with the customer base than forcing/expecting people to buy glasses.
Why not build different icon size into the software ??
you used not to be able to increase font size in binder but now you can. Also - adjusting pc screen res all the time is a pain - and makes redundant the fact that so much else in scrivener can be adjusted for size from within the software.
In a work flow it may be useful to have a larger icon at a certain point - such as when focusing on creating multiple synopsis- but later the emphasis may alter where one is focusing on titles and so the icon can be smaller.
I’m telling you these icons are doing so much and if you cant see them it’s all pointless - they might as well be turning into little flying elephants.
Many years since the previous latest post, I come to this thread via a search, seeking info on enlarging icons in the latest version of Scrivener for Windows.
My issues are a vision handicap, for which magnification is a workaround. I run dual 25 inch monitors, and ordinarily my browser runs at 175 to 200 percent. This option is a tad more challenging in Windows based programs. Increasing screen size in the Windows operating system often results in erratic performance in software. So, I was hoping that Scrivener allowed some of the icons in its GUI to be enlarged.
As I said, this thread is about three years old now. Any chance the functionality I’m seeking has been implemented yet?
