I've got a portal in my app that's a selector - user clicks on a row, and that determines what is displayed elsewhere on the screen.

I've got now problem making this work in general. My question is about visuals for the selection portal itself.

Normally I might go with the native portal highlight, or script a container field in the protal to change the background. However, some rows in the portal will already have a different background color, as this is used as a visual metaphor in the app (for newness). Not open to suggestions to change that.

So I need an alternate method of highlighting a row, that doesn't involve the background color.

I'm looking both for technical advice, as well as general UI/visual design advice. What would look good, first of all, that also wouldn't be too hard to create.

Thoughts I've had include:

* a bold line around the selected item (probably by using a slightly larger container field behind the one that's already there)

* changing text to bold or another color

* icon (although I think this wouldn't be noticeable enough)

Who's got some bright ideas?

Thanks!

Cant you have a different background color for the one that was selected and the one that you use for newness? You would most likely want the selected color to override the one marked new if it is selected.

The accepted standard (at least for well-behaved OS X apps) is:

selected = highlight (background color + invert text color)

new/unread = bullet + optional bold + optional text color

The forums just ate my longer, somewhat more eloquent response.

As substitute, I'll just say: thanks for the replies, but I really do want to ask my original question, even in light of the considerations above.

Thanks for any further responses.

In cases like this i use some sort of icon (a bright colored icon to show selection, a hollow icon to show deselection)... as well as text where it's relevant on the layout.