Re: Appearance properties

[Frederic Crozat <fcrozat mandriva com>]

Le 10/11/2009 15:23, Bastien Nocera a écrit :
> On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 09:04 -0500, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin wrote:
> > On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 10:55 +0100, Ruben Vermeersch wrote:
> > > While I generally trust designers in their judgement and I agree that
> > > there was an icon overload, I now often feel a lack of icons. My menu
> > > usage has slowed down because I now have to read everything instead of
> > > being able to rely on icons.
> > A good example of slowed down usage is Inkscape.  Open the Path menu and
> > you have to read most of them to actually find "Division" where it used
> > to be a quickly identifiable by its icon (not to mention that the
> > difference between Division and Exclusion was better served by an icon).
>
> That's a bug in inkscape. If it _requires_ the icons to be useful or
> usable, then it should force the icons to be visible in those menu
> entries.
>
> It would have broken the same way before if a user disabled icons in the
> menus themselves through the GConf key.

It seems nobody was doing it before, so my guess people were happy with it.

> > > Having a ton of icons is certainly not good, but is there anything
> > > that shows that having none at all is better?
> > That's my 2 cents as a user: unless studies have generally identified a
> > speed up in menu usage, I would think it was a move the opposite.
>
> There's a bugzilla with plenty of reasons behind this change. You're
> more than welcome trying to second guess our esteemed community
> usability people.

What I find hard to understand is there was NO discussion about this on 
the usability mailing list.

A lot of those "UI discussions" seem to appear on various bugs, where 
people might not subscribed to and changes are done without any prior 
notification on usability list.

> Maybe we'll change our minds later, but without compelling arguments,
> it's hard to make a case for reverting this change now.

It is quite simple : this change affected all ISV (we could say inkscape 
was an ISV for instance, or Firefox) which were using GTK+, without any 
kind of prior notification to be able to fix their application.

That is the reason why I had to revert the "icon in button" and "icon in 
menu" on Mandriva Linux 2010.

--
Frederic Crozat
Mandriva