Re: Proposed Epiphany UI changes

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

On Sat, 2004-11-06 at 11:23 +0100, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> On Sat, 2004-10-30 at 01:55 +1000, Peter Harvey wrote:
> > http://www.dsl.uow.edu.au/~harvey/epiphany_ui/
> > 
> 
> My thoughts, I dont have veto power on interface changes anyway, so you
> should talk with Christian too.

He keeps directing me to you. :)

> - The ability to move and remove bookmarks item with context menus
> should be preserved for accessibility and intuitiveness. It's not
> obvious that user should open bookmarks editor to be able to do it.
> Bookmarks and normal toolbar are different case. The first can be
> manipulated also outside editing mode. There should be context menus
> also for normal toolbars but probably they should not be available
> outside editing mode.
> 
> - We should keep references to the bookmarks bar in the View menu.

In my patch I have made I removed the bookmarks bar completely. Now I
understand that in current Epiphany the bookmarks bar exists and is
different to the normal toolbar. However, bookmarks can be added to the
normal toolbar in Ephy 1.4.
     1. As a user this makes me wonder what the difference between the
        bookmarks bar and normal toolbar is.
     2. As a developer I wonder why the difference exists at all. I'm
        not sure it makes things more friendly for the user to have the
        distinction.
What was the reason for differentiation between the two toolbars. What
was the reason for then deliberately blurring the differences? These
questions probably sounds aggressive, but they're not mean to be - I
would just like to know the human-interface reasons for the distinction.
If the reasons are purely technical (ie. trying to make the bookmarks
code more separate) I have shown that it's not necessary.

I agree that in the View menu the option of showing/hiding alternative
toolbars should be there. I'd even agree to having a default alternative
toolbar called 'Bookmarks Bar', but I'm not sure it needs to be a whole
new toolbar class with subtly different behaviour.

> - I'm not convinced about the ability to add bookmarks from the toolbar
> editor. IHMO it's more sane to keep the two things separated. Also
> popping up a menu for dnd is a bit confusing.

Same as when drag-dropping a file using the middle-mouse button. I agree
it seems a little confusing, which is why I still support drag-drop of
bookmarks/topics from the bookmarks editor to the toolbar. I will
shortly reinstate the 'Show on toolbar' option within the bookmarks
editor as well.

I added this functionality to the toolbar editor only to make it more
discoverable. That is, when a new user wants to put things on his
toolbar, it is now obvious that bookmarks and topics can also be put
there (not just regular things like stop, forward, backward, etc.)

> - I dont think we should drop the ability to add items to the toolbar
> from the editor. It's something available in all browsers (even if in a
> different way) and necessary for accessibility.

I'm not sure what you mean here. In my patch:
      * Normal toolbar items can be added  from the toolbar editor.
      * Bookmark items can be added from the toolbar editor.
      * Bookmark items can be added to the toolbar from the bookmark
        editor (drag-and-drop - and I will shortly reinstate the 'Show
        on toolbar' option, but not 'Show on bookmarks bar').

> - I'm not yet fully convinced by the automatic hierarchy thing, but I
> should prolly try it out before building an opinion :) I wonder if it
> would be too difficult to #define it in the code and enable by a
> configure option or something. That way it would be easier for people to
> try it out.

If my rewrite of the bookmarks code is accepted, it is trivial to do
this. :) There is one small file (ephy-bookmarks-menu.c) which
constructs XML representations of the bookmarks menu. Only that file
needs to be changed (and I already have the rewrite done, I'll include
it in a #ifdef block at the next release).

Hope I'm not being too demanding here, but I really appreciate the
feedback. I'm perfectly happy for this patch to be dumped if it's shown
to be crap, so don't hold back on the criticisms. :)

Thanks,
Peter.