Re: Request for very small UI change in Tomboy

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Fri, 2007-02-09 at 06:10 -0800, Sanford Armstrong wrote:

> Normally I'd agree.  But I would guess that most Tomboy users who
> haven't tried the Sticky Notes applet never will.  So for 80% of our
> users, the option just takes up space.  This plugin is really meant as
> a migratory path for existing Sticky Notes applet users.
> 
> Obviously I can change the patch to disable the option if people think
> that follows HIG better.

The normal rule of thumb (although the HIG doesn't explicitly say this)
would be that hiding menu items is only appropriate if they're going to
remain hidden for the lifetime of a particular application instance,
from startup to quit.  If the user can potentially do something to
enable/disable them in the meantime, the menu item should be shown and
enabled/disabled as required.

In this case, I guess theoretically a user could create some sticky
notes while Tomboy is running, and Tomboy should spot that and enable
the "Import" menu item.  But that pretty much falls into the 'corner
case' category, so I guess just hiding the menu item is fine.

(Not really familiar the Tomboy UI, but one way to get around the whole
issue might be to have a generic "Import" option that let you import
notes from a variety of sources, one of which might be Sticky Notes.
The Import option would always be available, assuming you could import
from simple things like text or html files, and the Import dialog could
check for and list only those sources that were available at that moment
in time.)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems