[Glade-devel] [glade-3] minor GUI issues

[e98cuenc free fr (Joaquin Cuenca Abela)]

Hi Paolo!

Paolo wrote:
> Hi Damon, Joaquin and others!
>
> On Fri, 2004-05-07 at 18:10 +0100, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> > Here's a few minor GUI issues that I noticed:
> >
> >  o Do we want to set the initial positions on windows like 
> in glade-2?
> >    Currently they appear anywhere, not really in useful positions.
> >    (Ideally we'd save window positions between sessions, but I don't
> >    think there is a standard way of doing that yet. Maybe later.)
>
> IMHO the positions should not be hardcoded and if they do not 
> appear in useful positions I'd consider that a bug in the 
> WM... in practice however it may make sense.
> To save the window positions all the other apps I know of use 
> gconf, but we currently do not depend on it.

In this issue I'm with Damon. Maybe you can somewhat put the blame in the
WM, but I don't know if it has enough hints from the application to do a
good job. After all, the entity with the best knowledge about the role of
each window is the application itself. The WM knows better about what are
the other visible windows, but I think that the app knowledge gives a better
positioning than the WM knowledge (at least I've always prefered the glade-2
positioning to the glade-3 one with metacity and with windows' WM).

I'm not against gconf use. I hope that it will be easy enough to #ifdef the
relevant parts on windows (I will cope with it if we depend on it).

> >  o The GNOME HIG says that exit buttons shouldn't be on the toolbar.
> >    http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/toolbars.html
> >    See the Guidelines section.
>
> Agreed, I also think that a "New" button is pretty standard 
> in editing apps... there's a bug in bugzilla about this.

Looking at the bug report, I don't remember when I said that Quit should be
there, but I think that I was biased by my use-case (start-test-quit).

But I agree that for a general user it's not so useful, and it looks logical
to remove it from there (specially if the HIG says so :).

I think that the HIG also says that you should have a New item in the
toolbar. I don't find the only New that makes sense in glade extremelly
useful, as you don't usually create a new project, you use the one that
glade creates automatically or you load a new one, but I will not complain
too loudly if it's for the sake of consistency between applications.

> >  o I don't think the property editor or widget tree should 
> have their
> >    type hint set to GDK_WINDOW_TYPE_HINT_UTILITY. That makes them
> >    always-on-top, but they are too big and get in the way.
>
> Agreed.

Idem

> >  o I think the dialogs for setting up widgets (e.g. table rows/cols)
> >    should appear where the mouse is, not the middle of the screen.
>
> I'm not convinced about this... I'd find it more intuitive if 
> it appeared positioned over the widget it refers to.

That can be hard, as the widget has not yet been created when you show this
dialog box.

Cheers,