Re: More UI Change for GDM

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 13:18 -0500, Brian Cameron wrote:
> Once again, I realize its past the UI freeze data for GNOME, but there
> is one more UI change that I think should be considered for GNOME 2.12.
> Calum is in the middle of doing a UI review for GDM, which I was hoping
> would get done in time for me to get these changes in before the freeze.

Yep, sorry about that... had hoped to complete it early this week, but
circumstances have conspired to keep me out of the office until today.

> He still isn't done with the review, but I'd like to address the issues
> that he highlighted:
> 
> 1) Remove mnemonics from the tabs in gdmsetup, since you aren't supposed
>     to use them according to the HIG.

If you're doing that, you probably ought to remove the numbers as well,
as they're really only there to support the mnemonics, and just add a
bit more overall clutter.

> 2) Change "Always disallow TCP connections to X server (disables all
>     remote connections)" checkbox label to "Disallow TCP connections to
>     Xserver (disabls xforwarding, but doesn not affect XDMCP".  Calum
>     highlighted that the previous message implied it also disabled
>     XDMCP.

Well, it did to a muppet like me, anyway :)  A system administrator may
know differently, and one of the recommendations from the ongoing UI
review may be to separate the admin and end-user GUIs.  But in the
meantime I'd agree some sort of clarification here is probably
worthwhile.

> 3) Change "Include All Users" checkbox label to "Include All
>     Users (Get Include user list from /etc/passwd, not appropriate
>     if using NIS)".
> 
> 4) Change "Face Browser" tab label to "Users", since the information
>     on this tab doesn't just affect the face browser, but also controls
>     which users can be selected for Automatic/Timed login.  The following
>     text is added to the top of this tab to make it more clear what this
>     tab does:
> 
>     The Users tab specifies which users are visible to GDM.  Users listed
>     as Included will appear in the Face Browser if it is enabled in the
>     "Security" tab and will also appear in the drop-down list for
>     Automatic/Timed login in the "General" tab.  Users listed as Excluded
>     will not be displayed regardless of whether "Include All Users" is
>     checked.
> 
> 5) Fixed the sensitivies on the Users tab so that only the Include list
>     is made insensitive when "Include All Users" is selected.  Previously
>     the Exclude list was also made insensitive, which is a bug since the
>     Exclude list is used regardless of whether "Include All Users" is
>     checked.
> 
> Most of these changes are string changes, and its still before the
> String freeze.  The only real UI change is fixing the sensitivity
> bug on the Users tab.  Is it okay to put this fix into the 2.12
> branch?  The fix is already in GDM2 CVS head, but not in the branch.
> 
> There is another issue that Calum highlighted.  According to the
> HIG a program shouldn't use a notebook with more than 6 tabs.
> gdmsetup uses 8 tabs.  This issue will  wait until a future
> release to get fixed, since I'd like Calum to finish the UI review
> before fixing this problem.

Yes, it may be that if we do decide to separate the functionality into
two separate UIs for the two main user categories, the number of tabs on
each one becomes acceptable again.  Can't promise that just yet, though.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems