New status colours

[temp.user.11000]

Error: Red
Paused: Orange
Queued: or Light Purple
Downloading: Green or Light Green for queued downloading torrents
Seeding: Blue  or Light Blue for queued seeding torrents
Stopped: Black
Stalled: Black or Highlighted Grey (current color is perfect)

Colors need to give an impression of the torrent on first sight. I would suggest if you make the colors customizable but I'm not sure if this is easy of difficult.

no two colors must be the same... and a Stop button is a must...
Paused torrents maintains connections... Stopped torrents drops all connections.

Edit: I added the light green and light blue for queued torrents and removed the purple for queued torrents.
what do you think of the colors?

[sledgehammer_999]

Code: Select all

Paused torrents maintains connections... Stopped torrents drops all connections.

Not on qbt. Paused torrents drop all connections too.

[Nemo]

As it has been discussed and said so many times.. Pause = stop, this is with most libtorrent based clients. So if its called stop or pause it doesn't matter in this situation.

And welcome by the way.

[ciaobaby]

[quote="temp.user.11000"]
thank you for the clarification but, what if I want to pause the torrent without losing the connection to seeds and peers?
[/quote]

You don't! and of course in the interests of the swarm you shouldn't!

If you are a peer such an action may/will prevent other peers from getting connections. If you are a seed you are "freezing out" peers and reducing the piece distribution in the swarm. The need to pause but keep connected is a very selfish attitude to have in a "sharing" community. 

[Nemo]

Your color selection is very similiar as from Calidude at page 3 (http://qbforums.shiki.hu/index.php/topic,2509.msg13157.html#msg13157) so its fine. Almost everyone agrees on the basic colors like red/green/blue to be used, which probably will.

[lgallard]

Error: Red
Paused: Red
Queued:Grey
Downloading: Green
Seeding: Orange
Stopped: ?? (if I add a stop button)

Stalled uploads (sedding):  Orange light
Stalled downloads: Green light

[hazardass]

I agreed to the proposed color coding because ANYTHING is better than the current one!  But what I don't understand is why a specific color scheme has to be proposed and then approved.  How about letting people set their own colors in the options? 

[Nemo]

Maybe the focus is now to set a new improved color scheme as a basis and later add a custom color selector. I don't know much about implenting things like this so can't judge if its hard or not. Best we can do is be patient for now .

[MassMan]

Are stalled downloads considered an error? Would prefer if stalled downloads has a different colour than working downloads.

[sledgehammer_999]

No they are not considered as an error. They are considered as inactive (a torrent with no activity).

[Calidude]

[quote="Nemo"]
Maybe the focus is now to set a new improved color scheme as a basis and later add a custom color selector. I don't know much about implenting things like this so can't judge if its hard or not. Best we can do is be patient for now .
[/quote]
Yes. Doing any more than just improving the current look of qBittorrent is a waste of time right now. There's more pressing matters to worry about than coding a new UI to change the UI.

[sledgehammer_999]

I have uploaded a special build.

Note 1: Be open minded. Your brain probably is used to the old colors and the new ones might seem odd at first.
Note 2: The icons that appear next to the torrent names might confuse your brain too because they use the old color scheme.
Note 3: These colors are meant for a light background only. Don't complain about dark backgrounds.

I used some colors from Calidude's recommendation and most people's.

Here is the rundown:

1. Download: Forest Green (34, 139, 34)
2. Seeding: Dark Blue(0, 0, 139)
3. Paused: Salmon(250, 128, 114)
4. Stalled: Black(0, 0, 0)
5. Queued: Teal(0, 0, 0)

I really like Teal. However Black for Stalled seems a bit odd to me. I prefer something indicating inactivity.

I have also a surprise for you. I made a quick hack in the code in order for you to be able to help me more effectively. Now, if in the same folder as qbittorrent.exe exists a file named colors.txt, qbt will use the file to load new colors. There are some caveats though:

1. It will not be permanent for the final code. This is a hack.
2. Only the keywords that are present in the original file are used.
3. The keywords are case sensitive.
4. There must not be a space before or after "=".
5. The values are RGB values separated by comma. Don't leave a space between numbers or commas.
6. You need to reopen qbt in order for it to load the new colors. The file is read once on startup for performance reasons.
7. Normally stalledDown and stalledUp use the same color. However I split them here. Maybe someone of you comes up with a good combination. (however it isn't obligatory to define different colors)
8. Normally queuedDown and queuedUp use the same color. However I split them here. Maybe someone of you comes up with a good combination. (however it isn't obligatory to define different colors)

I want your input on the scheme I used(mentioned above). And if possible mention some good refinement.

And finally the special binary: http://builds.shiki.hu/temp/qbt_with_colors.7z

[sledgehammer_999]

For those you want to experiment. Here is a good list of named colors with rgb values: http://cloford.com/resources/colours/namedcol.htm

[hazardass]

sledgehammer_999,

Thank you!  This is a huge improvement because now we don't have to strain our eyes to read the torrent names (at least most of them).
I think black conveys 'inactivity' very well.  It's easy to read too.  Also, now that the icons are also more contrasted against the text, it's easier to look at the icons and tell what's what. 

Her are a couple of minor suggestions:

    - I have a small issue with the 'dark blue' (0,0,139) for 'seeding' titles.  I think it doesn't contrast well with the black titles, so I would change that to blue (0,0,255).  I tried it and it works much better imo.
    - The 'salmon' (250,128,114) you've chosen for 'paused' titles is still a little too dim imo.  I tried different versions of that and I think if you crank down the Green and Blue to about 50, it works great.  It's not too red to be annoying, and it's not too dim to strain the eyes.  So try (250,50,50) for 'paused' torrents and see what you think.

Thank you for spending time creating this 'hack'.  I love it!   I really hope you consider leaving some form of this hack available in future versions of QB, so we can customize it to our own taste.
Thanks for the consideration.

[sledgehammer_999]

Thanks for the suggestions.
Note to all: You experiment with different colors too if you want. eg in the "salmon" case, paused doesn't have to be a gradient of red. It could any color. I just went with a gradient of the current(red) color.

About the black: I may be wrong here but it might confuse the users. Generally in any UI normal text is displayed in black. So the users seeing black in the transferlist might think it is a "normal" torrent (eg active+downloading).