Re: Review of Keybindings [Re: Dia's user interface]

[Lars Clausen <lrclause cs uiuc edu>]

On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, James K. Lowden wrote:
> On 23 Apr 2002 14:33:23 -0500 "Lars Clausen" <lrclause cs uiuc edu>
> wrote:
[...]
> Preference Rot
>
> After reading some of the earlier comments and Joel's book
>
> (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000057.html)
>
> I looked at Dia's preferences with new eyes.  Using Glade, I mocked up a
> new preferences dialog
>
>  http://www.SchemaMania.org/dia/noodle/dia_preferences.glade.
>
> As you can see, I was able to reduce the size of the dialog by 3x (mostly
> by using standard checkboxes and a tighter layout).  By putting
> everything on one page, it's easier to see what's what, IMHO.  What do
> you think?  (BTW, it's my first time using Glade.  Darned if I can get
> right-justified labels to work: I want Width, Height, and Zoom to be
> right justified, but Glade just refuses to display them that way.)

I really like the look of that.  The prefs dialog at the moment is an
eyesore (though very easy to extend), and it's difficult to tell what only
goes for new diagrams.  Could you take a look at the current preferences.c
and see how much work it would be to use your layout?  Also, how much work
will it be to keep it up-to-date when more stuff is added (apparently,
Glade assumes Gnome and there is some work involved in making the code
non-Gnome)?

I don't think the labels should be right-justified.  Makes them look
ragged. 

> I dropped three preferences and made a few other changes:
>
> 1. The Grid size is square; you can't set X and Y to different scales.  I
> understand why you'd want to in a graph, but I think it's more a
> hinderance in Dia. 2. No undo level setting.  Who needs it?  Please don't
> answer! :) Anything less than infinite undo is just silly today.  A
> technical shortcut would be to set it to 1000 internally.  That's close
> enough to "infinite" to fool most people.  3. "Reverse dragging selects
> intersecting objects" Huh?

3) is explained already, 2) I agree with -- Gimp needs it, as its undo
parts are big, but not us, 1) I don't like.

What happened to "Recent documents list size" and "Use menu bar", or did
you work off an earlier version than that?  I guess you did, since the
whole "Diagram Tree" tab isn't there.  For that I'd say the window manager
should take care of the size, and the dialog could show at startup if it
was shown when Dia was shut down (like Gimp does with several dialogs).
Don't know about the hidden objects -- it's not obvious what that does.

-Lars

-- 
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause)| Hårdgrim 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?