Re: Window subtitles

[Gezim Hoxha <gezimetc shaw ca>]

On Fri, 2007-16-02 at 20:16 +0000, Alex Jones wrote:
> Hi list
> 
> Another crackpot idea for you. A lot of applications name their windows
> in the form "Some Thing - Some Application". Some just name their
> windows in the form "Some Thing", relying on the icon to portray more
> information about the window.
> 
> I think the latter form is recommended by GNOME HIG, but I'm not so sure
> it's the best option when one particular object can have many windows. A
> recent example I brought up with Gossip (which has since been adjusted
> for) is that, given all this Telepathy stuff, we're likely to see many
> windows for the same person. In such a case, "John Smith -
> Conversation", "John Smith - File Sharing", "John Smith - Video Call"
> would be a lot better than "John Smith", "John Smith", "John Smith",
> even if they did all have different icons.
> 
> So it seems, from my POV, that it's a good idea to portray an extra bit
> of information about a window, a "window subtitle" (in contrast to
> "window title"), so to speak. Like I said, many applications are already
> implicitly doing this just by using a - to separate the title from the
> subtitle.
> 
> Perhaps it would be a good idea for Gtk to have support for setting
> "window subtitles", and for now it could simply communicate that with
> the WM as being "title - subtitle", but this gives us the flexibility to
> do more fancy things such as those illustrated by the (albeit rather old
> now) Tango window experiment mockups
> <http://tango.freedesktop.org/Window_Experiments>, and probably a few
> other things, too.
> 
> Thoughts?


I really like the idea and I was always opposed to that HIG suggestion
that window titles should only contain document information.

-Gezim