Re: Uniformity?

[gelderk natlab research philips com]

> Have you looked over Federico's UI Guidelines template in
> /gnome-libs/devel-docs/ui-guide yet?

I have now.

Found a nice inconsistence in the gnome-help-browser. The tear-off
menu off the URL behaves differently from the other two: it does not
fit itself into the browser when I double-click on the little vertical
bar on the left, but it does when I move the entire menu towards its
``proper'' place in the browser. The other two menus behave exactly
opposite of this.

Lots of work to do for uniformity :-)

I do have a few wild ideas on the topic:
 1 flexibility on the side of the user
 2 ease of programming applications.

ad 1
Wouldn't it be nice if the user could configure his/her applications
together, with respect to use of buttons, menus keystrokes and the like?
(a ``keystroke'' is a sequence of keys, like in emacs)

The user can tell that Quit is a button, a field in the File-menu, or
both. That the keystroke `q' is quit, or `^Q'. Or both.

ad 2
Wouldn't it be nice for a programmer only to say add_quit() in his/her
program, which results in all possible quit-buttons and key-strokes to
work?

The function-call would result in a look-up in the user-configuration,
thus adding all components and listeners into the application.

It would result in quite a complicated configuration (lots of
dependencies) and difficulties for new functions in new applications,
but it would enhance uniformity and prevent ugly things like same
keystrokes in different sub-menus.

+--- Kero ------------------ kero@dds.nl ---+
| I ain't changed,                          |
| but I know I ain't the same               |
+--- M38C --- http://huizen.dds.nl/~kero ---+