Re: [Usability]A Tale of a Toolbar editor

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

On Mon, 2003-03-17 at 10:26, Biswapesh Chattopadhyay wrote:
> We would really love to have toolbar editing implmented by default in
> EggToolbar (we'd like menu and shortcut editing to be implemented as
> well and integrate well with the toolbar editor, but that's another
> thing). Just a couple of point I feel are relevant from Anjuta's POV:

I think there are several developers would interested to help with it.
The problem is get everyone on the same line about the user interface.
And to design a decent API too. This is probably going to take some
time.
I think the sooner we get something in Egg, the better. Obviously we
need to agree on things like your point 4 before.

> 1. Handling multiple toolbars gracefully is a must, since we have lots
> of toolbars which show and hide themselves frequently depending on the
> IDE run context. I'm sure other complex apps like Abiword, etc. will
> need it too.
> 
> 2. There should be a way to set the display style for each toolbar
> (Text, Icon, Both Horizontal, Both Vertical, Priority Horizontal).
> Gustavo implemented most of this at a toolbar level for BonoboUI and I
> really like the way it works. Here's a screenie:
> 	http://sourcebase.sourceforge.net/anjuta2-toolbars.png
> [ Note that this complements the Epiphany toolbar editor ]

We had some discussions about this on the epiphany list.
My opinion is that it is unnecessarily complex (per toolbar
configuration). This is also Seth opinion I think.

> 4. There should be graceful handling of the situation where there's an
> large number of toolbar items. I feel the Epiphany style is OK for a
> small number of items, but it might be pretty unweildy for a large
> number of tool items (say, 100 or so). Besides, D&D for customization is
> pretty overrated IMO. It migtht make a cool GUI gimmick but makes life
> difficult for users of more complicated apps like office suites and
> IDEs. It is also difficult to make it a11y friendly I think. I
> personally think the OpenOffice 'Tools->Configure' thing is pretty cool
> since it brings menu editing, toolbar and toolbar item customization,
> keyboard shortcuts and user-defined event macros under one consistent
> GUI. Here're the screenies:
> 	http://sourcebase.sf.net/oo-eventeditor.png
> 	http://sourcebase.sf.net/oo-keyeditor.png
> 	http://sourcebase.sf.net/oo-menueditor.png
> 	http://sourcebase.sf.net/oo-statuseditor.png
> 	http://sourcebase.sf.net/oo-tooleditor.png

I think the direct manipulation that dnd provides is very good.
I played a few minutes with open office but I was not able to understand
how to configure toolbar items ...
Are you sure drag and drop is a problem for office applications ? I
think at least MS Office is using it.

Anyway the usability and accessibility teams should get a decision about
this, as stated in GEP 6.
Not sure why usability list is no more cced on this thread, I'm going to
readd it.

You are right about accessibility problems, but it's something that can
be solved.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105129
It's obviously quite a bit of work, but if we can share it in several
applications, it's definately worth.

Marco