On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 18:27 +0000, Calum Benson quotes from HIG:
> "If you plan to include your application's name in the title of a
> primary window..."
Since I wrote my first message, I've come to realize that the *only*
windows on the desktop that _don't_ have applications in the title are
_some_ "GNOME" ones. But in day to day usage, we see
Document - Inkscape
Document - Mozilla Firefox
Document - Open Office
Inbox - Evolution
source - Eclipse
Indeed, in regular use,
Document
from Epiphany [which is what I actually use] is essentially the only
major app not following this practise.
Obviously there are lots of !GNOME apps in that list. But the point
remains that unless something strong [social? technical?] is acting to
constrain it, the in practice default out there is Application names in
titles, and we are the ones rocking the boat and being inconsistent.
[I also borrowed a Microsoft Windows computer for 30 minutes, and noted
that essentially *every* app on this admittedly small sample identifies
itself this way. I used to think that the GNOME idea of not doing this
and strongly associating windows with application icons was so cool. But
nothing on my in-use GNOME Desktop apart from a few utility programs
actually does this. There's a big gap between premise and practise]
Anyway, looking at that list, it was obvious to me that the consistent
thing to do was to do what the HIG allows and put my application's name
in the title bar. I'm not happy about that (though it did have one
beneficial effect¹) but at least its consistent with the rest of the
desktop.
:(
On Tue, 2009-11-17 at 14:16 -0500, William Jon McCann writes:
> We will have an application menu at the top of the screen that will
> serve the purpose of identifying the application.
Huh.
A what?
Is this like the Global Menu (that works great, incidentally) that was
just rejected by release-team GNOME since it wasn't compatible with
GNOME Shell? [ok, I get that globalemenu is an applet presently, but I
was of the impression that the idea itself had been torpedoed, which I
thought a shame].
>
> Well, really now is the time. We are in the process of shaping the
> user experience for 3.0.
>
Indeed.
The debacle about removing menu & button icons from everywhere by
default without investing a huge effort to get applications to port
their code so that important icons are actually so marked indicates that
we're really lacking something in GNOME. The release-team new modules
inclusion process is fairly visible. The API and ABI stability
requirements are well established. But there's no stability in user
experience.
I would suggest that the HIG (or a replacement thereof) is the place to
get this right. The user experience of Shell — and that of applications
that are intended to be compatible with it — really needs to be
*defined* there. And then enforced. And then changes to that standard
need to be vetted and fought against just like changes to anything else
in GNOME.
Enforced?
Tricky.
AfC
Sydney
¹ So the unexpected thing was that having "Application" always present
in the title bar meant that when you first type the characters of the
field that is driving the . Try it composing a message in Evolution;
when you type the first letter 'H' of the Subject, you snap from
Compose Message
in the title bar to
H
He
Hel
...
which looks sort of ok once it gets going, but bloody awful and jarring
when it snaps from "Compose Message" to "H".
Going from
Application
to
H - Application
He - Application
Hel - Application
...
and so on actually looks really smooth (ooooh, animation :)) I'd go back
to document title only if I could just figure out an elegant way for the
experience of actually entering the title not to be jarring.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part