Re: Again: Newbie questions/comments (Was: Re: [Evolution] Wish list/Todo ?)

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Fri, 2002-07-19 at 03:51, Oliver Sturm wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-07-18 at 23:37, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
>
> > [snip]
> > > Well... I don't remember about Netscape, but Emacs (Gnus) doesn't, Mulberry
> > > doesn't... quite sure about those. Anyhow, I think configurable key mappings
> > > are not so far-out these days, are they?
> >
> > Outlook does. Mozilla does. Netscape does. I think Mutt does too?
> >
> > anyways, I can't think of a single gui client that allows you to rebind
> > keys to different actions. Not to mention this is complicated to do (if
> > you want to avoid conflicting keybindings that is, if you want to let
> > the user screw himself, well then that'd be easy)
>
> I don't think it's so difficult to do. A restriction of 'a key may only
> ever be assigned to one action at a time' is quite easy to check
> programatically and would do the job.

You obviously haven't come to realise that the mailer, the addressbook,
the calendar, the summary, and the shell are all separate programs.

who does the checking?

(Personally if this was considered "must have" and I had to implement
it, I would want it in the bonobo library so that any/all apps got this
"for free" however the bonobo API is frozen so this ain't gonna happen
afaik. Anyways, I wouldn't be surprised if this was on the radar for
like GNOME 3.0)

I'll also say "you obviously have never worked with bonobo-ui". I'll let
you go play with bonobo/bonobo-ui for a while to see what I mean ;-)

hopefully it is better in GNOME2, but I have not yet looked so I don't
know.

>  Or if the user is assigning
> ambiguous keys, tell him the key will be unbound somewhere else. Have a
> big red reset button for those guys who always click OK, no matter the
> message.

so what is your UI for setting the menu keybindings?

> > > Ok, sounds like you thought about it... But that may also be a reason why
> > > most other mailers I have seen display informational messages like that
> > > outside the message text.
> >
> > yea, we could pop up dialogs but I think most people would agree that
> > that would just be plain annoying. It would make me stop using evolution
> > - that's how annoyed I'd be. And yea, if I'm a developer and won't use
> > it, I guess I couldn't expect anyone else to :-)
>
> I wasn't thinking about dialogs. But in mailers I have seen information
> of that kind would be displayed on the status bar or some other
> informational panel. Don't get me wrong, I like the way it's done in
> evolution.

I'm not sure the status bar is appropriate, not to mention it'd be
pretty hard to display all the info. But let me get into why its not
appropriate:

1. it's for temporary status messages, ie they do not stick around after
the operation is complete. The validity of a message isn't really an
action

2. since some other operation may be invoked, the signature validity
message might get pushed off the bar

3. it's the last place most users would expect to find this info, I
normally never even pay attention to the status bar unless I want to
check on the status of an operation. The whole point of the status bar
is to be out of the way

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com