Re: [Usability]preferred applications dialog

[Sean Middleditch <elanthis awesomeplay com>]

On Sat, 2003-02-15 at 11:18, Sven Herzberg wrote:
> Am Sam, 2003-02-15 um 16.36 schrieb Mathew Johnston:
> > we can improve it still. The use of toggle buttons is cute, but I think
> > that their cuteness is outweighed by the fact that they are never used
> > anywhere else in the system. Also, if I click the "no" button, and it
> > turns to "yes", does that mean that clicking "yes" will turn the feature
> > on or off? Am I clicking, "yes" to turn on the feature, or am I
> > clicking, "yes", to switch it to, "no"? See what I mean? While
> > checkboxes may not fit aestheticly, they are the standard and are well
> > understood.
> 
> 1.
> They aren't widely used throughout the desktop, this is right. But if we
> always used that as a reason for not trying new things we cannot get
> really forward IMHO.

The toggle buttons are not going forward - honestly, usability wise, the
greatly suck.

> 
> 2.
> If you wanna know how we should handle the click and show thingies
> inside the dialog you can have a look at glade (glade gave me the idea
> to use toggles)

It is confusing, no matter what.  Just becaue another app is also
confusing and has poor UI doesn't mean we should make the core GNOME
apps confusing as well.  ;-)

> 
> > The left hand configuration item selector is also non-standard. Do we
> > have a standard for this? I mean, do we use a tree view? Do we use a
> > notebook view? Do we do like Galeon and have a slider panel thing with
> > icons for each configuration item? I sort of like the way that Galeon in
> > Gnome 1.4 does it, actually.
> 
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig/controls.html#controls-notebooks
> sais:
> <quote>
> If you have more than about six tabs in a notebook, use a list control
> instead of tabs to switch between the pages of controls.
> </quote>
> 
> I know that we don't have these six items at the moment, but I would
> prefer the tree because of it's cleaner look.
> 
> > Then there's the whole issue of preferred applications at all. Why do we
> > have preferred applications? Shouldn't we just have protocol handlers? 
> 
> So what protocols should window managers, terminals and editors listen
> to?

This I agree with.  It's a *lot* simpler to select "A web browser" than
select "an http handler, an ftp handler, https handler, webdav handler,
...".  I wouldn't even expect a user to understand what a protocol is -
almost everyone I know who isn't a tech-geek don't know what the whole
"http://"; thing is at all.

> 
> -- 
> Sven Herzberg <herzi gnome-de org>