Office2007 Skin "Feature"

[Albert Shenker]

According to Telerik, the radComboBox Office2007 skin, unlike every other skin, is supposed to have the combo selected text appear right against the left edge of the box with no padding (check out the link below to see this "feature").

http://www.shenkerinnovation.com/previews/testapp/combotest.aspx

Furthermore, they claim I am the first person to not like this. So, should I stop taking crazy pills, or do others agree that this looks really awful.

[Paul]

Hi Albert,

Thank you for being so active and pushing us.

Actually, you are really the first person to not like this particular skin. No one has ever contacted us on this question. Still, we do understand that this is major issue for you and we decided to modify the skin for the next official release of the control. Meanwhile, we can use the provided solution from the support ticket you have opened on the matter.

All the best,
Paul
the Telerik team

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[Albert Shenker]

Well, I appreciate the modification, but I wouldn't want you to do it just because I find the skin appearance problematic. Instead you should do it because the introduction of this feature doesn't seem to have any logical basis. No only does the pad-less prometheus appearance depart from the classic version, but it also departs from the generally-accepted notions of what dropdowns look like and what your other skins look like as well. This is why I found it hard to believe that this nuance was a result of customers' requirements.

Even so, I imagine it is conceivable that someone at some point may want to have a pad-less combobox. Along those lines, I have alwyas been a champion of leaving padding specifications out of your skins. The use of these, particularly in certain RadGrid scenarios, is very annoying. Instead, developers should be able to set padding using simple declarative properties.Unfortunately, in order to change the default padding, or set padding in almost all Rad Controls, it is necessary to create a custom skin. While this is a very flexible feature, custom skins certainly have their own issues (with control upgrading specifically), and for many cases creating a custom skin is quite a bit of overkill.

All this said, again, I just don't see how anyone can think the pad-less dropdown actually looks right. For the longest time I assumed this was just a bug in the prometheus version, and if no one else has complained about this, then I would think they too probably just assumed it is something that would be fixed eventually.

Regardless, I appreciate your effort to address this. Again, if the majortiy of the community or your customers actually feel that the appearance of the office2007 prometheus combo skin is appropriate, then you should certainly not change it on my behalf.