Re: New clock applet for 2.22

["Bryan Clark" <bclark redhat com>]

On 9/24/07, Diego Escalante Urrelo <diegoe gnome org> wrote:

On 9/24/07, Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com> wrote:
> On 9/24/07, Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org> wrote:
> > Calvin Gaisford and I have been discussing this a few weeks ago and
> > he'll work on getting the two merged. My preference is to use the
> > current backend code, and import the intltool UI in the clock. I don't
> > think it will be really hard, although I don't know how much work this
> > involves. I'm a bit unsatisfied with the UI, though, since it means
> > having a lot of information in the popup. So usability input would be
> > great.

I'd love to hear some feedback from others. There are some consistency issues most people can probably spot, like the [Edit] buttons should probably be [Edit...] since they open other windows to complete the interaction.  Things like that I believe can be done pretty quickly and aren't worth going back and forth on a mailing list about.

More obvious changes that are unlike other places in GNOME might warrant some discussion.  Usually GNOME applets would tend towards a hidden Right Click menu option off the main applet and this design went with having the Edit buttons appear inline of the interface because I believe if they are visually less strong than the surrounding parts they provide a more discoverable set of interactions for the interface. YMMV.  This is some of the cause I've found for people to say the UI looks busier than it has to be.

The [Set] button appears only on mouse rollover of the timezone areas, normally it wouldn't be readily visible.  I'm not entirely sold on this yet, my original design had a different method but I'd like to have this tested out before trying to make more changes.

If you have specific areas you feel need improvement I'd be more than willing to attempt to address them on this or another list if it's more appropriate.

> > The changes you've made look quite interesting.
>
> The ui bits are based on design input by Bryan Clark. Maybe I should put some of
> his earlier mockups on the wiki page, too.

Speaking of UI, I have a little suggestion (based on the mockup on Fedora wiki).
I see that below the world map there's a row that has a clock, the
zone and the weather, it's really cool but I can imagine it filling a
1024x768 screen pretty quickly. I would like to suggest that this rows
are self-aware enough to know if screen space is too short then change
from the "big" expanded view of the mockup to a more table like one
(with the cool graphics and stuff but with fonts a lot smaller).

But that's a minor thing, I think it looks great :).

I would avoid an auto-sizing algorithm and suggest something like this as a preference such that it doesn't make the layout too volatile; maybe you could get it right but the details would be very hard. However my real concern would be to layout the information tightly in a manageable format that's still visually clean, I haven't tried and there's probably a much better way out there.  Feel free to send mockups or sketches my way if you have ideas.

Thanks,
~ Bryan