It has been much discussed that the standard highlight bar in lists is too weak. It has also been much discussed that the higher visibility highlight bar which should solve this problem is essentially unusable. That’s because when the higher visibility highlight bar is in use, it causes the icons such as for note, sources, and media to be invisible in the Edit Person screen. I just now noticed an additional problem with the higher visibility highlight bar.
The additional problem is that the higher visibility highlight bar can sometimes also cause certain text to be invisible. For example, for the Marriage fact in the Edit Person screen the Details column lists the place of marriage and the name of the spouse. With the higher visibility highlight bar in use, you can still see the place of marriage but the name of the spouse is invisible. It makes it hard to deal with a person who has Marriage facts for multiple spouses.
Until they can “fix” that, another option is to look at the top of the side panel which shows the name of the spouse at the very top.
On my computer, only the Purple theme color approaches being “invisible”; all the others are at varying degrees of readability, depending on the contrast of the dark blue bar with the theme colored text (not the black text) for value fields such as Description and Spouse name, etc.
With the higher visibility option enabled I also experienced an Access violation message consistently when I chose to leave the Edit Person window open and merely clicked back and forth with the Settings option screen to change Theme colors.
I think I need to clarify a little further. I’m working on a project to move some data in RM from one fact to another. Namely, I used to include a transcription of a couple’s courthouse marriage record in the note for the Marriage fact. But now I’m blanking out the note in the Marriage fact and instead I’m including a transcription of courthouse marriage record in a new fact type called Marriage Record. That provides me with the flexibility to include or not include such transcriptions in narrative reports by including or not including the Marriage Record fact type in such reports. Generally speaking, I don’t want to exclude all notes from reports and there is not way to include or exclude notes from reports by fact type. The only thing you can include or exclude from reports is the fact types themselves.
I have been using the Marriage Record fact type in this matter for several years for all newly added people or all newly added Marriage facts for existing people. But I still have a lot of cleanup to so. To cleanup, I do things like highlight an existing Marriage fact, copy the text from the Marriage note, add the Marriage Record fact, and paste the text into the note for the Marriage Record fact. But if a person has marriages to one or more spouses, the creation of the Marriage Record fact needs to know which spouse and I can’t tell without interrupting my workflow to move off the Marriage fact temporarily which is impossible to do from in the middle of the dialog to add a new fact.
I may be missing something, but I don’t see how having the Spouses listed at the top of the screen or using the purple theme color helps with this problem. Here are three screen captures. (Correction: I interpreted the comment about a purple theme backwards. But in any case, the name of the spouse is essentially invisible with either the blue theme or the purple theme when using the “higher visibility highlight bar”.
Blue theme, standard highlight bar. You can see the name of the spouse.
Blue theme, high visibility highlight bar. You cannot see the name of the spouse.
Purple theme, high visibility highlight bar. You cannot see the name of the spouse.
