I'm having a love/hate relationship with Aero, the new translucent window border look in Vista. I find it nice-looking to have transparency in window borders and captions, but it makes recognizing the active window a lot more difficult, moreover when in a dual-monitor configuration, where not all windows overlap. I often take a look at my left monitor, thinking the application I see has the focus, press Alt-F4 to close it, just to realize I closed another application who's window was on the front monitor.
I have a very "orangey" background, which makes the upper-right "X" not obvious enough. With the default Aero color and transparency, here's an active and non-active window:
So I thought "Hey, I'll just change the colors". That's how I realized the problem wasn't transparency nor my orange background. The active window coloring is lacking one important feature: custimizing the text color. Take the same two applications as above, with an opaque default coloring:
A different text color, or different blured text background would make a huge difference. Maybe it's just me not used to looking at the red "X", but when scanning apps with our eyes, we're primarily interested in seeing the left icon and title.
I tried changing the active title bar colors via the classic interface, but it didn't change anything.
Technorati tags:
Vista,
Aero