Re: [Usability]A Tale of a Toolbar editor



Chipzz wrote:

On 17 Mar 2003, Biswapesh Chattopadhyay wrote:


3. We'd like toolbar customization to be in the toolbar context menu -
somehow makes more sense that way IMHO. But it should also be standalone
function and preferably some widget so that we can embed it in our
preferences dialog. It would be nice to right-click on a toolbar/menu
to customize it.

And how would you save your toolbar settings? I'ld suggest in a glade
file, but this pulls in a libglade dependency in Gtk+ which for obvious
reasons is crack :). This is why I think toolbar editing belongs some-
where else, like in a *grin* BonoboToolbar? ;P


Uhh we're discussing a toolbar editor (well at least we started with) for egg menus/toolbars that will become part of gtk in the 2.4 release (and if i'm understanding this correctly are a replacement for all existing gnome menu/toolbar implementation including bonobo). So putting this in gtk makes a lot of sense. But the configuration issue is a problem (gconf dep is bad probably).


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

This sounds like (is it bonobo?) verbs.

I think for the reasons above toolbar editing should not be in Gtk+, and
there is still a place for either a Gnome- or BonoboToolbar, which would
be radically different from the curent ones thou.
Well hopefully with gtk 2.4 there will be one and only one impelementation of menus and toolbars (with wrappers in order to guarantee api/abi compatibility), increasing ui consistency etc. Can't speak on the technical issues though.

dave




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