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QQ: is the font for "Alfred Update Available" text configurable?


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Hmm. I understand your concern, but wouldn't a broken font affect Alfred's entire launcher UI? Why is software update notice an important exception? There aren't any other kinds of text like this, right?

 

It's not a big deal, but given how important fonts are to my themes, I noticed that this seemed like an unnecessary deviation in theming...

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On 10/22/2021 at 6:48 PM, Chris Messina said:

but wouldn't a broken font affect Alfred's entire launcher UI?

 

Exactly this. Imagine this somewhat hypothetical scenario...

 

You're a relatively non-technical user who has installed an Alfred Theme which requires installing a 3rd party font. Other than selecting this theme, you don't really spend much time in Alfred's preferences (we even have some users who email us asking how to open Alfred's preferences). Then Apple does an OS update which, for whatever reason, makes this 3rd party font not render at all, so Alfred's main window shows no input or result text...

 

This gets reported to me, and I quickly create a workaround which either fixes the font rendering, or prevents the font from rendering.

 

Luckily, because the Alfred Update text is in the default system font, it's still visible in the Alfred window so the user can click to update, and the issue is resolved.

 

I know this sounds like "Disaster Scenario Planning", but my experience in having a large user base tells me that mitigation strategies like this can help save us many precious hours of user support.

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12 hours ago, Andrew said:

Then Apple does an OS update which, for whatever reason, makes this 3rd party font not render at all, so Alfred's main window shows no input or result text..

 

Does this happen often?

 

I understand your desire to mitigate issues with custom fonts and custom themes... but it seems (to me, you have the actual data) that the number of less technical users that will install a custom theme with a non-standard font (a process that opens Alfred's Preferences necessarily) is exceedingly small.

 

More likely, especially in my themes that use non-standard fonts, the user won't have the requested font, and Alfred will fallback to a standard system font (I assume), so it's kind of a non-issue for most users? 

 

Your scenario becomes problematic where the user actually goes out of their way to install a custom theme AND problematic non-standard fonts, right?

 

Sorry, not trying to be obnoxious — but personally I'd appreciate it if the Launcher UI's fonts were able to be completely consistent. The update text appears so infrequently that I'm not going to die on this sword, but I do think the rationale feels inconsistently weaker than other times when my proposals get shot down. 😜

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2 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

Does this happen often?


No, but if it happens even once it will could be a disaster resulting in hours of wasted time.

 

Comparatively, the different font is a momentary, sporadic, minuscule visual incongruity (almost) no one notices or cares about. In short, it is close to insignificant and has a strong reason to be the way it is.

 

Changing it isn’t worth the tradeoff of multiple users losing an entire afternoon chasing a bug whose fix could come to them.

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9 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

I understand your desire to mitigate issues with custom fonts and custom themes...

 

9 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

the rationale feels inconsistently weaker than other times when my proposals get shot down.

 

I can see that, but it seems to me that you're disregarding the effort it takes to implement these things again. It's never just a question of the value a feature would bring, but the opportunity cost of other stuff that gets dropped or pushed back as a result.

 

9 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

but it seems (to me, you have the actual data) that the number of less technical users that will install a custom theme with a non-standard font (a process that opens Alfred's Preferences necessarily) is exceedingly small.

 

I bet it dwarfs the number of users bothered by the lack of theming on the "update available" text…

 

9 hours ago, Chris Messina said:

but personally I'd appreciate it if the Launcher UI's fonts were able to be completely consistent.

 

You really think this is worth putting some other feature aside for? I mean, can you imagine a situation where this would be anywhere near the top of your list of things you'd want Andrew to spend his limited time on?

 

I dunno. I just don't really understand why we're still having this conversation when you know there's only one Alfred developer.

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