Re: Detachable Menus

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Wed, 12 Jun 2002, Gaute Lindkvist wrote:

> 
> > > horribly cluttered interface, like the dialogs for Sawfish at least used to be
> > > (*shudder*).
> >
> > This is FUD, the Novice level of sawfish had just about the same number
> > of settings as it has now. Novice level was not the default
> > (intermediate was, IIRC).
> 
> FUD?? I stated something that was my opinion. the "at least" part was
> thrown in because I currently don't use Sawfish, and don't know the state
> of it now. If it still has the same number of settings it is STILL
> horribly cluttered imo. Way, way, way too many options. Metacity is
> excellent. It doesn't need configuration-tweaking at all to do the job,
> and there are very few options. It just works.

 I don't agree with you, extended configurability is almost required for tools
one uses more than 20 minutes in their life.

> 
> I always set it to Expert to have all settings
> > so I could find what I wanted (kind of an oxymoron taking in regard the
> > current arguments against many settings, heh?).
> 
> Many settings make a cluttered interface and makes bugtracing much harder.

 They also make using the tool much more efficient. That's much more important
for professional users (from the user's POV of course).

> Most people don't understand that adding an option has to be carefully
> thought through, otherwise you'll end up with emacs (which I generally
> like, but hate the configuration system). Adding an option is not a "free
> way of making everybody happy", because it does have costs.

 If the options have 'user levels' assigned, there is no added costs from
user's POV. Dumb users just use novice user level and see only a few basic
options.

> This means that the current strategy of GNOME 2.0 is the way I see
> it (I had nothing to do with this):
> 1. The options that are sane and non-destructive go into the interface.
> 2. The options that some experienced users can't live without, but
> generally just clutters up the interface and are largely unnecessary, gets
> a manually tweakable gconf-key.
> 3. The options that are basically just broken are left out totally.

 IMHO it would be better to assign user levels to options and try to support
majority of options in the GUI configurator at the Expert level. Just because
amount of code and efforts required to support configurability of option is
very small (in average it's one entry in the table of options and one more
widget in the glade file (or zero additional widgets in glade file if
configurator is written properly)).

 Best regards,
  -Vlad