Re: [Usability] Re: EggToolbar

[Breda McColgan <breda mccolgan sun com>]

Alan Horkan wrote:
> 
> On 23 Jul 2003, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > > As has been mentioned before a toolbar with as many as 10-15 items is
> > > probably already too cluttered for a developers to really know what the
> > > prorities are.  Smaller toolbars and customisable toolbars allow users to
> > > choose what they really want if the defaults are ninadequate.
> > >
> > > I would really hate to see a few bad implementations and the limitations
> > > of older toolbars to completely kill off priority text (or whatever you
> > > want to call it).
> >
> > Oh I was not proposing at all to kill off priority text completely.
> > With current implementation there is a way to put the text beside the
> > icon but not a way to show the text only for the more important items.
> 
> The developers must choose terse descriptions and they must make
> intelligent decisions about what really is important.
> It sucks but this will have to be manually specified by someone at some
> stage in the process for each applications.
> You really cannot automatically decide what is important.
> 
> > That way on a not too big screen I guess items would start to overflow
> > at 5-6. That's why I was saying most toolbars would go out of screen.
> 
> Automtically truncating long strings might be worth considering.
> 
> As far as I know Egg Toolbar already has a mechanism to allow you to see
> menu item that there is ont enough room for.
> This is not so much a toolkit problme as it is a problme of getting
> developers to choose good short labels and to figure out what the most
> important high priority buttons are for their application.
> 
> The HIG will probalby need to tell developers that button labels should be
> only a word or two (not a copy of the Tooltip!) and that it should be
> limited to 10* items or less.
> (* 10 buttons might fit, things like drop down menus for fonts or zoom
> take up more space.  It is only a rough suggestion but if you have both
> text and icons the vertical space used including padding comes to about 60
> pixels, for aesthetics the buttons will have to be at least as wide as
> they are tall, 10x60==600 and you have a few pixels to spare on even a
> very small screen.  I clearly spent way too much time thinking abou this
> for abiword, which has a hidden pref to enable text lables on the
> toolbars).
> 
> The responsibility lies firmly with the developer, guidelines are the best
> we can do I think.
> 

Developers can also consult their friendly documentation buddies for
help on how best to phrase such text :)
We can advise how to use the minimum amount of text and yet not lose any
of the meaning, and how to optimize the text for localization.

Regards,
Breda.