Re: Trying a new toolbar style

[Ghee Teo <Ghee Teo Sun COM>]

Karl Lattimer wrote:
> On Wed, 2009-07-29 at 10:41 -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>   
> > On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 9:38 AM, Thomas Wood<thos gnome org> wrote:
> >     
> > > Hi folks,
> > >
> > > We've had a discussion on gnomecc list about removing the "Interface"
> > > tab from the appearance capplet (see discussion¹ in the archive for
> > > reasoning).
> > >
> > > However, before we do so, we would like to ensure the the defaults are
> > > correct. The main reason for the tab being there at all is because
> > > people felt the defaults are probably incorrect.
> > >
> > > The main default we would like to change is the "toolbar style"
> > > settings. I have suggested¹ that there is broad support for the "text
> > > beside icons" style, however there have been concerns that not all
> > > applications implement it properly. It is important to note that in this
> > > mode, only the most important toolbar items get text labels.
> > >
> > >       
> > While I am all for dropping the interface tab, I think it is silly to
> > ignore the results of distros which have already tried this change and
> > found it to not work.
> >
> > As Calum said, OpenSolaris had to go back to text-below-icons because
> > the mode you propose did not work as a default.
> >     
>
> 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.
>   
While I can't speak for Calum whether he has further finding on the user 
experience on this. I do recall the QA came to me asking: Why are some 
Icons do not have the text beside them, and some apps have different set 
of (i.e. different number of icons that have text beside the icons). He 
found that generally confusing.

Personally, I find not having a text label discouraging the use of this 
icon.
While I found Thomas' proposal for text beside looks neat and his 
reasoning sounds, that particular QA's questions were valid and I 
couldn't give him a satisfactory answers then. Now, I would just point 
him the blog page :)

-Ghee
> Personally I find no problem with the text-beside-icons, maybe there's
> something I've missed. 
>
> IMHO the vertical screen space is far more important than having labels
> for every icon, especially now that we're seeing more widescreen laptops
> and netbooks than old 4:3's because of this resolution in the vertical
> is reducing in most cases from 1024 to 800 pixels tall. 
>
> BR,
>  K
>   
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