Just my 2p - the new icons and bold font make it MORE difficult to see what the hell is going on.
Not sure if the “Show advanced” really helps either, as it feels like you now have to get to know TWO sets of trees. If anything, the “advanced” items should be formatted differently so you can see which ones are new.
However, if the prefs panel needs anything, it’s a better hierarchy (I think I proposed this in an enhancement request about a year ago) … though I’m guessing this will screw up any plugins that attempt to add their panels if the paths change.
Bottom line though, it’s another example of where a sensitive design eye would benefit the product.
It’s not really a question of having a “sensitive design eye”, coming up with an entirely new design would require a lot of reworking of how things work, which would then have to be balanced between what other enhancements we want to be working on. The advanced stuff as well as the icons are a first pass of cleaning up the prefs window, it will be cleaned up further, though probably not for 9.0, this is a longer process.
There is only one tree, the advanced toggle simply hides advanced topics, the trees themselves dont “change” they will simply become more fleshed out.
I hear you on it being a bit “much” when you have “Advanced” enabled. Perhaps it would make sense to not show the icons when in “Advanced” mode.
I suppose by a “sensitive design eye” I meant that it’s pretty obvious (being an ex-designer) that sticking a bunch of big fat icons and big fat bold text was not a positive step forward - as it just gives the user more visual processing to do.
I get that the tree items are just being hidden / shown, but it just doesn’t feel like that as there’s such a BIG visual jump - it’s pretty jarring, and if you had your eye on a certain node before the click, you wouldn’t know where it was afterwards.
I’m not sure I agree with you entirely there, I find when you are in the “simple” mode (where it only shows a few categories) the larger text and icons actually make it look far less daunting. The main idea behind the redesign is to make the preference window give less of a “holy shit” impression.
It’s not the ideal solution, but given the amount of time I had available I think its the best solution. I do intend to make more drastic changes in the future (as I have to some of the context menu’s), but at the moment there are bigger fish to fry.