Re: UI-suggestions

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Sunnanvind Fenderson wrote:
> 
> Why is the icon for "save" an image of a floppy drive? Okay, I know
> the historical reasons (it made sense on my parents' 386 with win
> 3.11), but why keep it these days?

This is a good question... I've asked this one before as well but
nobody's come up with a better alternative so far :)

> The issue is hitting the edge of the screen with my pointer. To use
> the menubar, I have to tap/click at just the right distance from the
> top of the screen (a range of a few pixels). Why not allow the user
> (luser, in my case... I've used GUIs for ten years but I still haven't
> learned to like WIMP-guis. The Ion wm is nice, though.) to click at
> the very top row of pixels? It's so much easier to hit.
> 
> Same goes for the task-list applet at the bottom.

Yep, you're talking about Fitt's law here.  In GNOME 2.0, it works as
you describe for the top menu panel, but not for everything (e.g. the
window list) on the bottom edge panel-- we ought to fix this at some
point.

BTW, we also have a mailing list just for UI issues that you might want
to subscribe to if you're interested in this sort of thing: 

http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems