Re: Toolbar editor

[Biswapesh Chattopadhyay <biswapesh_chatterjee tcscal co in>]

> On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 11:02, mpeseng tin it wrote:
> 
> > is there any plan to have a toolbar editor based on EggMenu in libegg ?
> 
> Do we even have any user requirements for such a thing yet?  Most people
> just don't edit their toolbars however easy you make it, so I'd imagine
> it's pretty important to find out who does, why, and in what sort of
> applications, before designing such a comparatively complex thing.

I disagree. I think there is a significant case to be made for menu /
toolbar / shortcut customization:
	1. With any reasonably complex application, users use about 20-50% of
the total featureset. As is well-known, this 20-50% is different for
each user. Hence, it is very likely that the user would want to
customize the menu/toolbar (esp. teh latter) to his/her liking, since
otherwise they tend to take up too much space.
	2. We already have quite a few GNOME applications that have written
their own toolbar editor (epiphany, anjuta2, galeon and balsa come to
mind immediately - there are certainly more). So, even if it is not a
hard requirement for most applications, it will at least promote code
reuse for the apps that need it.
	3. While toolbar editing is not a feature you might want to see in most
apps, it is definitely a feature you'd like to see in *some* apps.
Hence, there can be no reason not to implment it as an *option* (i.e.
use EggEditableToolbar widget instead of the plain EggToolbar)

> 
> I think the only sort of customization I've ever seen anyone do in a
> usability test is to remove some buttons, which turned out to be a
> pretty good indication that we just shouldn't have put them there in the
> first place :)

That is probably because they were not users with complex requirements
using complex applications ? Did you do the testing with developers
using Visual Studio or avid MSOffice users ? In my office, virtually
every developer I know has customized Visual Studio significantly. The
same goes for Word/Excel.

The point I'm trying to make is that these features should be part of
the API. Whether to use them or not should be left to the developer of
the application. There is, for example, not much point in using it for
gedit.

> -- 
> Biswa.
>