Re: Trying a new toolbar style

[Luca Ferretti <elle uca libero it>]

Il giorno mer, 29/07/2009 alle 14.38 +0100, Thomas Wood ha scritto:

> PLEASE TRY THIS OPTION BEFORE YOU COMMENT - A LOT OF PEOPLE DO NOT
> REALISE THAT ONLY SOME TOOLBAR BUTTONS GET LABELS IN THIS MODE.
> 
> Therefore, I would like to propose a trial period with this setting set
> to the new value, to give a chance for maintainers to ensure their
> applications work correctly. I have (regrettably rather hastily) already
> made the change to libgnome and I have opened a bug 590143 to discuss
> any issues.

May I ask to consider the option to revert to previous "text-below-icon"
default? Or is this now an irreversible change?

I've applied the "text-beside-icon" option in my working environment and
used it in last week. I feel this layout not good as "text-below-icon".

Reasons: 
      * toolbar items are now a smaller target - I've to apply more care
        clicking on toolbar and sometime I've to ensure I'm pointing the
        desired item (notable example: remove, spam and ham icons in
        Evolution) 
      * items with no text may use suboptimal metaphor - now that some
        items are icons only, their "bad" metaphor is fully exposed,
        forcing users to dwell on them to show the tooltip (examples are
        the "Browser" and "Visualization Effects" in Rhythmbox, but also
        the previously reported Spam/Ham icons in Evolution). You could
        say "fix the icon", but we can't control all GTK+ applications
        and their icons (and sometimes we can't design a well behaving
        icon) 
      * items with text are inhomogeneous - it seems there is no rule or
        guideline to choose which toolbar icons should have an item,
        only "for the buttons that will be most-frequently used" from
        HIG. Now compare, for example, Nautilus (browser) and Epiphany:
        Nautilus provides labels for both Back and Forward items,
        Epiphany provides label only for Back. Maybe is "forward" action
        more important/used in Nautilus then in Epiphany? But the
        navigational metaphor is the same. Same for Home item, labeled
        in Epiphany, only icon in Nautilus. Another example is gedit vs
        Evolution mail composer: the first have labels for Open, Save
        and Undo, the second only for Send. Again, is Undo more
        important/used in text editor then in email composer? Note that
        I'm not complaining about current layout in those applications,
        we could fix it marking undo in Evolution as important and so
        on: my concern is about an user experience that could risk to
        appear inhomogeneous if the choice of labeled items will not
        handled with care by _all_ existing gtk applications.

You could say that this is only an issue of myself and I can change the
toolbar style. Yes, I know, so please don't reply it :)

I think the previous text-below-icon was more user-friendly: I don't
have any other tangible evidence then my personal experience, but the
current "text-beside-icon" don't add too much value to GNOME experience
to keep it as _default_. Good to have it as option, not as default.

Cheers, Luca.