Re: gtk features

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 10:47, Dave Bordoley wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-02-03 at 10:38, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> > On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > 
> > > If you have a feature you want in 2.4, *and you plan to work on it
> > > over the next couple months*, and it's not already on the list on that
> > [snip]
> > 
> > Let me add http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=82162 to that list.
> > Once picked up, conditional cascading menus would be a big help in
> > combating needlessly complicated submenu's.
> 
> >From what hear, implementing those in gtk would be very hard right now

Well, there are multiple parts to that "hard"
 
 - Implementing it would be certainly rather challenging; GTK+ 
   tends to mix the ideas of selecting an item with a submenu and
   activating the submenu together.

   And doing *anything* in GtkMenu is hard, because there are
   already a whole lot of behaviors interacting in complex ways.
  
   But my guess it's a few days of work for someone with some
   experience hacking GtkMenu, a week or so for someone without
   such experience.

 - But the harder part is likely convincing us that it's not 
   UI crack. Anything that exists only on IceWM and OS/2 does
   not have a demonstrated track record as a user interface
   element. OS/2 has been around long enough, that you'd think
   that if it really worked well as an idea, it would have been
   picked up by more mainstream user interfaces.

   Remember on this, that 100 people following up to the bug
   saying "I think this would be a great idea" and 
   "OS/2 had total usability, dude" is not going to help 
   convince us. 

   What would help convince us:

   - A prototype that people could experiment with and see for
     themselves how it feels in the GTK+ setting.

   - Some informal user testing with such a prototype (with
     some balance between "naive" users, and users that have
     prior experience with mainstream user interfaces.)

     [ With the caveat that this is a misuse of user testing --
       it's been said thatif you go into user testing trying to 
       settle a question, you can almost always get the result 
       you want. ]

   - Substantial consensus of the GNOME usability team.

I don't think it's actually a likely 2.4 feature ... but if you
want to see it in 2.6, you should start working on the above
now.

Regards,
                                      Owen