size of Color Palette icons (NX6)

[potrero]

NX6.0.1.5 MP3

For some reason, the icons (color swatches) in Preferences > Color Palette are large sized, so that the full range of color options are not visible without scrolling thru the menu. This wasn't always the case in the past, and I'm not sure what changed. Is there a way to set the size of the Color Palette swatches?

Thanks.

 

[JohnRBaker]

It's not so much that they are larger, but rather that they have been organized in a more usable manner. As shown below, the new Color Palette (on the Right) is much easier to find a suitable color since they are organized by characteristic and not simply in some evenly distributed yet not all that handy scheme (on the Left):

Now as for the size of the new palette, it was designed such that, based on what we considered would be the normal size and resolution of a users screen, and taking advantage of the new style dialogs where you can have expanded or collapsed sections (and which Dialog Memory would retain the settings of from session to session) that if you kept the 'Favorites' section collapsed, that you would be able to see the entire 'Palette' section. Our assumption was that users would either tend to select from the full 'Palette' or for the 'Favorites' and therefore that under normal conditions, one of these sections would remain closed most of the time and therefore the user would need to do a minimum of scrolling.

Now we felt is was important to reorganize the layout of the full Color Palette so as to make it easier to find and select the desired colors. Note that we hired a consultant with expertise in the design of software interfaces for graphic art type applications and the grouping and presentation of the colors are based on his recommendations. We had received many complaints about how it was difficult to pick out particular types of colors, such as the different levels of gray siting just one example, and so we made the changes that we did for NX 6.0.

So may we suggest that to minimize the scrolling that you decide, after working with NX 6.0 for awhile, as to whether you will be using a limited number of colors which could be selected from the 'Favorites' section of the dialog, or whether you like to pick from the full spectrum of colors and therefore prefers to use the 'Palette' section of the dialog. Once you've determined your 'best practice' simply collapse those sections of the dialog which you either do not use or which you use infrequently. And with that in mind, if you wish to have the absolute smallest 'footprint' for this or any other NX dialog, you can always select the 'Hide Collapsed Groups' toggle at the top of the dialog and all of your collapsed sections of the dialog will be removed giving you the smallest possible 'footprint' of the dialog, as seen below:

Note that this 'Hide (Expand) Collapsed Groups' option can be set on a case-by-case basis, so this can be used to completely removed rarely-used sections of the dialog. Note that if there are only one or two sections which you would like to remove while keeping others available even if you may wish to keep collapsed most of the time, what you do is expand all sections you wish to remain available and collapse the ones you wish to remove and then toggle the 'Hide Collapsed Groups' option. Once that is set, then collapse the sections remaining which you would like to only access occasionally. Note that this level of content customization can be very useful for trimming the size of dialogs as well as even limit what new users, perhaps those just learning the system, and so they are not confronted with a lot of stuff that would be of little value to them or even things which you don't want them 'playing' with while learning the basics of the system. To that end, all of these changes can be captured on a user-defined Role so that it's very easy to go from one set-up to another and even creating ones which can be shared with other users, such as those I mentioned who may just be using NX for the first time.

Anyway, I hope this helps explain what and why we did what we did.

John R. Baker, P.E.
Product 'Evangelist'
Product Design Solutions
Siemens PLM Software Inc.
Cypress, CA

http://www.siemens.com/plm

http://www.plmworld.org/museum/

To an Engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.