Selection flickers to dark grey for a split second before settling on light grey

[Daniel van Vugt]

System Settings: The rounded selection rectangle flickers on mouse click.

Using Unity8 on desktop, when I click on any icon in System Settings a rounded selection rectangle appears. However during the click that selection rectangle flickers to dark grey for a fraction of a second before becoming light grey.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Hmm, seems to be a common issue. You can see the same flicker in some parts of the dash like when selecting a department.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I think the same weird flicker happens on text selection widgets when they lose focus. They start out white, but when un-focused they flicker to dark grey before settling on light grey.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

Unlikely to be unity8's fault. Please set to Confirmed otherwise.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Yeah probably a common UI toolkit issue. Maybe even intentionally designed that way.

I'm just glad to have finally articulated this into a bug report. This flicker has been bugging me at least on a subconscious level on the phone for a very long time.

[Zsombor Egri (zsombi)]

Could we get a video about this pls?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Here's a video of the click slowed down 8X (taken at 240 FPS and plays at 30 FPS).

When slowed down eight times, it appears the darkening animation is intentional. And it starts to look good too. But the animation needs to last about 10X longer for it to really be perceptible and beneficial. The key problem with it right now is that it only lasts for 1-2 frames on a typical 60Hz display. So at that speed it just looks like a glitch.

Whatever the current animation duration is, make it about 10X longer :)

[Jonas G. Drange (jonas-drange)]

We use some custom code in System Settings, so this may be related to that. However, you say you can repro it in other places, so we'll mark Settings as incomplete for now until word gets back from UUITK.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I think I'm seeing this in GTK (Ubuntu 18.04) now too.