Re: Request for very small UI change in Tomboy

["Sanford Armstrong" <sanfordarmstrong gmail com>]

On 2/9/07, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
> 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 patch, if I start Tomboy and there are no sticky notes, it
will not bother checking again until I restart Tomboy.  So the menu
option will either exist or not exist for the entire lifetime of the
Tomboy instance.  So it seems that we do comply with this rule of
thumb.

> (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.)

Yes, that would be better.  But right now we only offer import of
Sticky Notes.  ;-)

I think I'll go ahead and commit this.

Thanks,
Sandy