Re: [Usability] Gparted: a usable program

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2006-02-05 at 11:45 +0100, David Christian Berg wrote:
> Hey Kyle!
> 
> I installed the newest version of Gparted, that can be found in Debian.
> It's incredibly hard to test, because you don't know, what happens, once
> you did a change. I think the interface needs an "Apply Changes" and a
> "Discard Changes" button, that are greyed out, to tell the user, that
> the changes made won't be instant apply.
> These buttons should at the bottom of a "Changes Pending" list on the
> right.
> Furthermore the program should always be executed as root and hence ask
> for the root password on start up.
> As for the interface: I do agree with Alan's remarks, but am going a lot
> further. There are many things, I'd instantly change.
> First of all: The colours for used and unused. They are way to close to
> one another. I can hardly tell them apart on my laptop. There is further
> more no use to explain those, because they are self explaining in the
> first place.
> My suggestion is to use light shades of the colours indicating the
> filesystem as background and using the colour of the filesystem for the
> used space. That way one can get rid of the frames and still has all of
> the information needed. Also decrease the height of the bar. it takes up
> a whole lot of space, without any need.

I'm going from screenshots only; I've not had a chance
to try on GParted.  Although I'd certainly like to.
I've got a partition I'd love to resize.

In the US, roughly 10% of males have some form of color
blindness.  I suspect the percentage is comparable in
other parts of the world.

Usage of color alone as an indicator of vital information
makes an application completely non-accessible.  And we're
not just talking about non-accessible to some small fringe
group of people.  We're talking about one in every ten men.
That group includes me, as well as a number of other Gnome
developers.

I don't know an ideal solution in this case.  With the wide
borders I see in the screenshots, different stroke patterns
could help.  But then, those are really wide borders.  For
a wonderfully innovative solution to a problem like this,
check out the "shapes" ball theme in glines.  I didn't do
the artistic work to make it happen, but I did do some of
the complaining the may have contributed to it. ;-)

--
Shaun