Re: Dia's user interface

[Pierre Pronchery <pierre pronchery defora org>]

        Personnaly I discovered the kind of interface Dia uses with the
Gimp, and I immediatly loved it. However I'm not happy with some points.

As some have already said, this kind of interface needs powerful window managers, and certainly a dedicated 
virtual desktop: when I tried to use Dia with Windows at school, it was a pain to search for the notepad 
window under three diagrams.
I have even sometimes this problem when I use sawfish, thanks to its virtual desktops it's not too 
problematic. But all users do not even know how to switch from one desktop to another, I saw it at a 
computer's school!
Personnaly using WindowMaker for a couple of years, it runs perfect with maximized diagrams and other windows 
always on top of it. I shade them when I want to see more of the diagram.

The tips shown when running for first time are very annoying to me. I never read them. Even worse are the 
druids: most asked questions are good defaults for many users, and that's the Options->Preferences menuitem 
is all about!
I think slash screens are not fancy when not slowing the app, because then you're sure the program is alive 
and showing up soon. But showing an ugly splash screen when exiting the app, like in Evolution, is 
_ridiculous_. As a user I can hope all my programs, moreover when in 1.0, will ALWAYS exit nicely.

And now my most-wanted feature, also in Gimp, is the menu. I'm still sometimes looking for the File->Save 
As... menuitem in Dia's main window instead of the contextual menu. Maybe Dia should remember what is the 
last used diagram and have the contextual menu also present in the main window.
This feature can also cause problems, when you're focusing with mouse, and focusing another diagram while 
going to main window's menu. When this happens the user should be able to notice immediatly (...and there's a 
undo button).

That's all I can remember now. It's a good idea to think of the interface.
Thanks for your work, I hope you'll make many happy Gnome users ;)


Pierre Pronchery


On Sun, Apr 21, 2002 at 04:43:31PM -0500, Lars Clausen wrote:
> After reading <URL:http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html> about
> user interfaces in open-source software, I would like to hear if anybody
> on the list knows something about user interfaces (more than just from
> having used a bunch).  If there are any, could you point out the worst
> problems that Dia has in its interface?  I'd like to turn some attention to
> that as we work towards a 1.0 release.
>
> -Lars
>
> -- 
> Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| H?rdgrim of Numenor
> "I do not agree with a word that you say, but I   |----------------------------
> will defend to the death your right to say it."   | Where are we going, and
>     --Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire  | what's with the handbasket?
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