Episode 35: Colours

There we are, one minute a couple of us are playing around with Google's Web Toolkit, and the next the Boss looks over our shoulders and starts jumping up and down excitedly. No, it's not his bladder problem flaring up again. It's not even because Alison's 'accidentally' elbowed him in the gonads again. It's worse than that, it's because he's seen nice colours on the screen.

So, a week later Alison and myself are in his office demoing a new business expenses app. It's our first GWT app, so it's got all of the Ajaxy interaction you could ask for, with a light-weight Apache Derby backend on a decidedly elderly development server. It's a bit too gaudy for my liking, but the Boss likes lots of bright colours and big friendly fonts. It works too, but he hardly seems to have noticed.

With us is Gilbert, who works upstairs where the air is rich with oxygen and minds are attuned to higher things.

'Well?' the Boss asks, having been allowed to click on the buttons and drop-downs and combo boxes all by himself.

Gilbert nods sagely. 'It looks good,' he admits grudgingly. 'Very modern looking interface compared to what you lot usually deliver.'

The Boss does an embarrassed grin. Alison looks for a sharp knife. 'Well, we know that some of our less competent users will find this easier to deal with,' I reply. 'Notice the big bright buttons? And the bright, child-like colours? And all of the data's on the network, so you can't accidentally reformat your machine while…'

The Boss coughs sharply. 'That's a nasty cough,' Alison tells him. 'Have you tried switching to a higher nicotine brand of cigarettes? That should work wonders.'

'I do like the colours,' Gilbert admits. 'Though I think that red is a bit on the insipid side.'

I look at the screen. It's bright red. A bit like the Boss's face.

'Perhaps something blood-red?' Alison suggests.

I check that she's not got anything sharp to hand. She hasn't, unfortunately. 'We could hack the style sheet,' I suggest, nudging the Boss from the driving seat.

I fire up a couple of tools, find a suitable candidate red and whack it into the appropriate CSS file. I hit refresh and we have a red that looks like it's freshly spurted from a punctured jugular.

'Better?' I ask.

Gilbert nods. 'I like it. There's something almost alive about it. But it does make that blue look a bit weak. And the yellow's not right.'

The Boss is not to be outdone - we're into the realms of management now. 'You're right. Let's ditch the yellow and go for something green.'

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Continued at TechBookReport