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

[Oliver Sturm <o sturm manfred-dahlhoff de>]

Quoting Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>:

> > 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?

No more than one of the applications have their ui active at the same time 
(in the current design), so overlapping definitions shouldn't be a problem. If there
are any parts of the applications' uis that are actually active at the same time,
you'd have the problem assigning unique accelerators, anyway, you even have
it currently. It could be solved by centralizing the configuration for those
applications (which is probably already the case, to provide for proper integration
in the shell).

> (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 ;-)

I haven't, you are right. But as I take it from the other thread, there's actually
a set of config files that evolution developers handle, that contain all the 
keystroke definitions. So why couldn't a configuration dialog be integrated 
that lets the user handle the bindings in a comfortable way while supervising
the process to prevent duplicates? I don't see what this has to do with bonobo.

> >  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?

I don't have any specific thing in mind. But I think that because key binding
changes
will probably never be something that everybody uses, it _may_ be a little more
difficult to use than a GameCube. Know what? After you told me it's actually 
possible to change key bindings using an editor, I did it that way. Of course it 
would be fine if I wouldn't have to do it again for the next evolution version, but 
other than that, I don't need loads of comfort for a task I do once, or once every 
few weeks maybe.

> > [ pgp sig status text cut ]

> 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

I second all of that, I also never use status bars for such things. 
Maybe a good idea would be to have a column for it... so I can see the status
of validity (after having checked, of course) for messages in the list without
activating the message itself.

Oliver Sturm <O Sturm Manfred-Dahlhoff de>

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