Signal editor (was Re: [Glade-devel] small patch)



On Fri, 2004-01-16 at 01:52, ext Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
 Tommi wrote:

On Tue, 2004-01-13 at 23:11, ext Joaquin Cuenca Abela wrote:
Hi!

I've been hacking a bit on the signal editor.

What do you think of an interface like that one:

http://e98cuenc.free.fr/signals.png

Hmm.. that feels unnecessarily crowded to my taste.  It's 
showing all possible signals for every widgets, and yet you 
usually only ever use one or two.  Keeping signals like 'map' 
always visible makes the dialog pretty cluttered.

The plan is to make the divide the signals by its class, opening only the
topmost class. That leaves only 4-5 visible signals by default.

It's still a work in progress, but you can see a more recent screenshot
here:

http://e98cuenc.free.fr/signals2.png

That's better, but I think it still has the same problem.  (I was
actually thinking you should show the widget class as header even if you
did show just the signals that have handlers.)

The basic problem with having all the signals in the same tree is that
you're repeating useless information (<Type signal handler here>) over
and over again, making the relevant information (which signals actually
have handlers) more difficult to find.  You can't be certain which
signals have handlers unless you expand all classes and scroll the list
around.

The added benefit is that you are saving one click when adding a signal
from the topmost class, but that's all.  Adding a signal from ancestors
requires you to expand the class first, no help there.

I don't think adding a signal from the topmost class is that often used
that you need to optimize away one click, making other things harder in
the process.


Can anyone make an educated guess whether or not the ability 
to add multiple handlers for the same signal is actually used 
in practice? 
It's obviously making the UI more complicated, but is the 
feature useful enough to warrant that, I don't really know...

I'm still not sure that it will make the UI more complicated. There are
several ways to leave multiple handlers per signal, and still share the same
UI with the "only 1 handler per signal" alternative.

For instance, you can say that the handler is instead a comma separated list
of handlers.

Showing more information pretty much always results in more complex UI. 
There are degrees of complexity, though...

Comma separated list would be hard to discover, and to see all handlers
for a signal you'd either need to scroll horizontally (even worse than
vertical scrolling) or have quite a wide window.


-- 
Tommi Komulainen <tommi komulainen nokia com>




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