[Glade-devel] Making property editor as big as posible!

[juanpablougarte at gmail.com (Juan Pablo Ugarte)]

On Fri, 2013-03-08 at 16:18 +0900, Tristan Van Berkom wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Juan Pablo Ugarte
> <juanpablougarte at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi guys, I am trying to polish the Glade UI and one of the goals is to
> > make better use of vertical space in the property editor so we can fit
> > more properties at the same time.
> >
> > There are a few modification in 3.15 as mention in my blog post
> >
> > https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2013/03/06/glade-drag-drop-support
> >
> > But now I am playing a little bit more and choose a somewhat unorthodox
> > layout for the UI I basically took out the inspector/property editor out
> > of the hierarchy and put it on a side so that it can take the whole
> > vertical space of the window (no more wasted space by the menu and tool
> > bar)
> >
> > https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/files/2013/03/glade_new_layout.png
> >
> > I must say it looks odd at the beginning but after a few minutes it gets
> > better :)
> >
> > What do you guys think?
>
> Hi Juan,
>    I don't think it's a good idea at all to "chop" the menubar/toolbar off the
> way you did (it looks so unnatural and it's so non-standard that I can't
> agree with it) *but* perhaps something can be salvaged from this...

Yeah I know I would not either, I was just playing and wanted to share
it. I got to tell that having the UI made with glade makes it very easy
to play with it! heheh but what I was trying to do was move the status
bar under the workspace, but that also looks bad.

> One thing that I find interesting about this experiment is that, perhaps
> it could be nice to place the <search widgets> entry in the toolbar aligned
> to the right hand side (this would save vertical space from the inspector &

Yes that would be good!

> property editor zone without creating this really weird interface, also it
> would be a natural place to put the search entry I think, similar to firefoxes
> search entry and not so far off from where Glade originally had it).
>
> Also, I still really don't like what you've done to the "Docs" and "Clear"
> buttons, they should really be implemented as contextual "actions"
> and automatically appear in the context menu (as the Docs already
> does) or optionally in the toolbar (perhaps the "Docs" button should
> also appear in the toolbar).

Well you can set the default value from the property editor contextual
menu, but adding a clear properties context menu item sounds even better
than adding an item to the toolbar.

> I think that we can remove the "Clear" button completely, I think
> I recall Vincent Geddes arguing the same thing; the "Clear" button
> is probably never used.
>
> So I would prescribe:
>   a.) Remove the "Clear" button altogether
>   b.) Make sure the "Read Documentation" feature is implemented
>        as an action, and make it "important" so that it also shows
>        up in the toolbar.

Yup, sounds good!

greets

JP