Re: [Usability] Re: My (ongoing) analysis of the proposed modules

[Noah Levitt <nlevitt columbia edu>]

Thanks for the review.

On Sat, May 10, 2003 at 18:26:23 -0500, Gregory Merchan wrote:
> 
> "Charmap" is not a word. Try "Map".

Now that there's no _Find button, I've switched the menu
title to _File.

> 
> This menu has only one item. That's not a good sign, but I don't have any
>  suggestions about it at this time.

Not a good sign? What of?

> 
> Change "Quit" to "Close". (Pick any flamewar about Quit v. Close for why.)

Hmmm.

> 
> "Expand/Collape All" All what? Why is this a check item?

Indeed. I hated that menu item. It's gone in cvs.

> 
> "Zoom Mode" looks like it'd be related to "Zoom In" and "Zoom Out".

True. I wouldn't mind calling it something else. I didn't
come up with the name on my own. :-)

> Why not remove the option and leave it on? Hide the zoom window when focus
> is lost.

That's a thought. Maybe I'll try that in cvs and see how
people respond to it. 

> 
> Make "Unicode Details", "Annotations and Cross References", and
> "CJK Ideograph Details" the head items of their option menus.

Err.. menu items in their own right, and head items of their
option menus? I tried this at first and found it very
difficult to use. I don't remember exactly why.

Anyway, the treeview and all the menu items are gone in cvs. 

> 
> Just leave "Snap Column to Power of Two" on.

But... then it's ugly.

> 
> "Find..." et al. I can't tell what this does.

It searches for a character by name. I could change the menu
item to "Find a character by name" or add a sentence in the
dialog. Advice? :)

> 
> "Hex Code Point..." For most people, a hex is a curse, not short for
> hexadecimal. Inside the dialog, it's a "Unicode code point." I still don't
> know what exactly a "code point" is; unfortunately, I don't know a nice way
> to convey the idea either. A contrained entry would be better than changing
> the dialog text. That may require a modified GtkSpinButton.

Unicode assigns a number to each character, as they say.
That number is what I mean by a code point. I'm open to
suggestions.

> 
> "Character in Clipboard"  This item is very odd to me, perhaps because the
> clipboard usually has more than one character.

It means, jump to the first character in the clipboard. This
is an extremely useful feature that I stole from ucm.

> 
> Can the font style menu be changed into two toggle buttons, Bold and Italic?
> I see that "Regular" is sometimes "Roman" and "Italic" is sometimes "Oblique".
> I also see things like "Light", "Medium", "Demi", and "Book". It looks like
> there are many names for the same thing. Shouldn't typesetting be considered
> a corner case here and whatever fine distinctions there may be left to a
> typesetting application?

Yeah, probably a good idea.

> 
> The map is very large, so scrolling is imprecise. Perhaps this could be
> broken into multiple pages?

I think I prefer to have it continuous, but perhaps there
are other solutions to this problem?

> 
> The information about characters appears to be editable, but my changes
> don't stick. This is a relief. ;-) The horizontal scrollbar won't go away.

It's editable so you can copy and paste. The scrollbar is
permanent so that it doesn't change size as you move around
the characters.

Anyway, like I said, that stuff is gone in cvs. :)

> 
> The "Text to copy" field and "Copy" button seem odd to me too.

How so? That's just like gnome-character-map.

Noah