Re: Trying a new toolbar style

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 29 Jul 2009, at 15:47, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> Calum, is there any chance you can provide a copy of Sun's findings  
> WRT
> to this reversion? It would of course be useful to understand the  
> actual
> reasoning made.

The evidence was largely anecdotal, but some of it is captured in this  
bug report:
<http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4345>

Basically the problem was that several applications (I don't recall  
which ones, off-hand) weren't setting the is-important property on any  
toolbar buttons at all, so the user just saw a row of icons.  And to  
compound the problem, often none of the buttons had tooltips either.   
(Yes, I should have filed more bugs upstream at the time; I suck.)

IIRC Glade's toolbar editor never used to allow developers to set  
either of these properties for any given toolbar button, which didn't  
help.  I don't know if that's changed in the past six months or so --  
if not, it would be good to make it a priority (assuming it's  
technically possible), especially if we go ahead with the proposed  
change.

I also proposed a GNOME Goal last year to make sure apps were all  
working sensibly with text-beside-icons mode, but as yet it hasn't  
been adopted: <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/Proposals>

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems