Re: [Usability]GNOME 2.0 feedback

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

On Fri, 2002-07-19 at 00:50, BioChem333 wrote:
> I also don't like that transparency was removed
> from the panel background options, or that the menu panel isn't
> customizable at all.

Yay for transparency! :D I hope it will one day be possible to have
complete panel transparency, including taskbar buttons, etc.

  
> > "Dialogs have help and close buttons. This is daft. What happened to
> > cancel and OK? (If I hit close, does it apply the changes I've made or
> > not? What if I shut a window from the window manager? In fact, I tried
> > this and the behaviour is downright dangerous - closing via the window
> > manager applies the changes, which isn't at all what I would expect.)
> 
> I would have to agree here also; sometimes I just want to cancel and get
> back to the way things were. Making it easier for someone to permanently
> screw something up is not very user-friendly.

A revert functionality could be quite a lot of trouble though. I also
thought about this... I'm not sure, but I think it's just a matter of
getting used to it. Think of reallife, when you set a switch on a
device, you expect the change to be immidiatly and to undo it, you have
to know what you did. It's the same with preferences and usually there
is some help if you forgot what the default was.
I never had a problem with this so far. The only funky situation was
when I switched to left handed mouse and wondered why I couldn't click
on right handed mouse again. ;)


> It's nice to have tabs in the terminal now, but they
> should work the way they used to and should be consistent throughout the
> G2 applications (eg. gedit tabs are totally different than gterm tabs).

I disagree. The terminal itself is also completely different to the text
editing widget of gedit. You can't really compare those apps and I
believe that consistency is important, but too much consitency can also
get dull and contra-productive. The only difference I see is, that
terminal tabs take all the screenspace and that's not really a usability
problem, is it? It looks better IMO. Afterall it's the terminal, this
looks completely different than every other Gtk app anyway (it consists
mainly of a black, white or pink text area).


> > "In the workspace switcher, you can drag windows between workspaces, but
> > dragging within a workspace doesn't cause the window to move (despite
> > it moving in the workspace switcher view).
> 
> This is another good point, and also when a window is moved to a
> workspace that does not have focus, that workspace's view in the
> switcher isn't updated until that workspace is given focus.

Why would you want to move your windows using the workspace switcher?
Sure it's cool, but why is it usefull? When I discovered this behaviour,
I thought it was a good idea that I can only move windows to other
workspaces this way. That makes it a loss less complicated. Also don't
forget that windows can not be on two workspaces at once, so when moving
the window into another workspace, it would suddenly "flip" at one
point.


Daniel