Re: GEP 6: Toolbar

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Fri, 2002-09-27 at 19:45, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 27, 2002 at 05:23:37PM -0700, Seth Nickell wrote:
> > I don't think we should have lots of buttons anyway, so this doesn't
> > concern me. And I like that important buttons take up more space making
> > them an easier mouse target.
> 
> The brass ring here is to support user configurable toolbars.
> People will add things, and components will want to merge in
> extra things.  All of which will tend to swell the size of things.

Components merging things needs to be kept in control. Components are a
useful tool, but they shouldn't be dictating the interface we present to
users. The same problem occurs, e.g., in the windows status bar. If one
company were designing what appears in the status bar 90% of the stuff
that ends up there currently wouldn't. The problem is that individual
(people or companies) naturally and understandably tend to overestimate
the importance of their work to the user. XP appears to be using a sort
of preferred list to deal with this.

User's customizing things I don't expect to blow up the size of the
toolbar dramatically. At least, I haven't seen this happening on
environments like MacOS/X on which the toolbar is fairly easy to
customize (and tries for a small number of items by default).

-Seth