Re: [Usability] UI guidelines and the libraries

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> > I agree with your point generally (see below). But I think the cost of
> > people rolling their own alerts out of GtkDialog is outweighed by the
> > usability benefit of meaningful button labels. Developers could even
> > use a cut & pasted utility class, or one in a non-platform utility
> > library.
> 
> Agree, it's fine to have stuff that requires small hacks (especially
> if implementation notes are included). Just not stuff that requires
> serious reimplementation, or really harmful-in-other-ways hacks.
> 
> I don't mean to make a huge issue, just wanted to be sure we were
> clear on this point.

Gregory and I have been slowly going through and coding various
recommendations. I hope the final HIG will include implementation notes
for potentially tricky things. For example, I have sample code that does
almost everything we want out of a dialog (sans the spacing, which we'll
drop if we can't figure out a way to implement it).

If we wanted to keep the more "ideal" scope of the HIG, in terms of
driving future GNOME usability development, one thing we could do is to
put sections in explaining what we really wanted but didn't specify for
GNOME2 because its difficult/impossible without butchering existing
library APIs. Another alternative would be to explain the ideal and then
have a "GNOME 2" point that explains what people should try for in GNOME
2. 

The purpose of either of these being that we hammer out the issues and
"ideal" interfaces now so libraries will have a guideline to work from
when they move into the api-munging development phase again.

-Seth