Re: [Usability] Theme Instant Apply

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006, Thomas Wood wrote:

> Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 15:42:13 +0100
> From: Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Theme Instant Apply
>
> Could anyone give me some advice on bug 149323 (HIG issues with Theme
> Preferences). The issue is that the theme manager often takes longer
> than one second to apply a theme, so therefore it should not be instant
> apply. Would it be acceptable to most people to change the theme manager
>   to explicit apply?

Yes and no.

Ideally we just want it to be faster.

Currently it is instant apply.  Changing it to explicit apply and then
changing it back to instant apply again later when the speed improves is
unacceptable churn, something we would rather avoid so the less than
perfect status quo wins.

It came be instant apply long long ago in early in Gnome 2.x at this stage
I think it is too late to change it and the explict apply appoach would be
better served by an entirely different application.  Explicit apply would
be good for a tool with one with a much better built in preview of what
you are going to get.  If it were designed to be small and fast you and
target XCFE and GPE as the potential audience it should be able to find a
viable niche (or alternatively you could find out what those two are using
now and tweak it so that it would work nicely as a drop in replacement
within Gnome).

I do love those small fast simple apps in GPE and XFCE and love the
potential of being able to swap out Gnome components with other great GTK
applications.

Hope that helps.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/