F-Spot UI Consistency and Polish

["John Stowers" <john stowers lists gmail com>]

Hey,

I have been running f-spot from CVS again recently and was wondering
what people though about how the UI looks / behaves with respect to
the Tag bar (Ctrl-Alt T), Find bar (Ctrl-f), and Query bar
(Shift-Ctrl-f). On first inspection I have identified the following
inconsistencies;

* The Find bar appears on the top and the Query bar on the bottom,
going from one to the other causes the main pane to jump up and down.
* If the tag bar is present in the photo view (As opposed to the
browse view) it duplicates the applied tag information with the tag
icons beside the comments entry
* The find bar can be shown and hidden from the menu, the tag bar and
query bar cannot.
* Find is Ctrl-f, Query is Ctrl-Shift-f while tag is Ctrl-Alt-f. All
three make mystery bars appear/disappear yet have different key
modifiers.
* The query bar has a little Valid/Not Valid text indicator. The find
bar has a small information icon on the right with "No matching icons
found" when a search returns no matches
* When you push Ctrl-f for the first time there is a helpful centered
message saying drag tags here to search, no such prompts for the other
bars.

There are also smaller inconsistencies like the alignment of the items
in these bars, but those are largely a consequence of those problems
listed above.

Potential solutions / items for discussion
* If the find bar and query bar are mutually exclusive then they
should appear in the same place.
* The Query bar should use an information icon to indicate valid
searched like the find bar does to indicate no results have been
found.
* Change the Tag bar shortcut key to be shift-ctrl-t as recommended by
the HIG [1]
* Remove the small tag icons beside the Comment entry in the photo
view. Show the tag bar at the bottom of the photo view to provide the
same information
* Show the Find bar and the Query bar, alternately, just below the
date widget (where the find bar is currently shown)
* Does it make sense to show the Find and Query bars in the photo
view? Or just the browse view
* Move "Drag tags here to search for them" to beside the information
bar icon and show it when no tags are being searched.

Sorry about all the nitpicking, if there is a consensus on how to best
address these items then I will provide patches.

Comments?

John

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/input-keyboard.html