Re: Re: To answer your question about the upcoming Style-Guide...

["Dan Kaminsky" <effugas best com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: jeff muller <jmuller@vcn.bc.ca>
To: gnome-gui-list@gnome.org <gnome-gui-list@gnome.org>
Date: Friday, July 24, 1998 4:57 PM
Subject: Re: Re: To answer your question about the upcoming Style-Guide...


>On Fri, 24 Jul 1998, Dan Kaminsky wrote:
>
>> > Of course, Word tried this.  They had a small LAMP icon which
>> >turned yellow when you hit a feature you might be confused about.
>
>> > They got rid of this in later versions...  I wonder why?
>>
>> Of course, they went onto the Office assistant, which just bothered the
>> user.
>>
>> I have a *possible* idea.  It'd increase the space taken up by LyX's
>> toolbar, but what about a mini CLI window that would spit out error
messages
>> and the like from the applications?  Kinda like a stderr box.  If you hit
>> space twice, a line would pop up with a hyperlink on "Situations that
>> require additional space between letters", which would give you a
>> hyperlinked index of links to say "Generating a numeric list"  "Aligning
>> text along a vertical line" etc.
>>
>> Maybe this stderr window should be part of the Gnome toolbar?
Hurmmmmmmmm.
>>
>
>This is my first posting to this list but I have to say, this stderr
>window is a brilliant idea.  Maybe as a piece of the tool bar, maybe as a
>xconsole-ish window.


Heh, thanks!  :-)

xconsole?  Is that where text just sort of shows up on the root window?
Part of me likes that and part of me is like...well, it's hidden too often.
User preference, I guess.

Color would probably be used, in much the same way as the net game
"Acrophobia" executes it.  Text would come up one color and "cool down" to
another color...maybe white to blue so the hypertext nature remained
obvious.  That way there'd be more of a hint besides motion that stderr was
moving.

Speaking of moving, the window would need an autoscroll checkbox and a
scroll bar.

I'll add the stderr window to the Stealth Project(TM) mockups.

>It is good because it could be nicely context sensitive, provide quick
>information about the behaviour exhibited by the app and the hypertext
>links would facilitate a speedy learning curve for Gnome apps.


Exactly.  One thing that'll get worked up by me in the mockup is exactly how
to
signify that there is stderr window from the present focus app.  We don't
really want users saying "Why isn't this working?  Maybe the error bar
says."  Too much eye batting.  Somehow, a user must see
non-obtrusive(meaning occluding) motion in an area he or she didn't expect,
or something like that.  I'm tempted to say we should use two different
stderr windows, but that's not efficient by any means.

>It also continues a tradition of free software of providing
>relatively *useful* error messages, as opposed to the Blue Screen of
>Death style favoured by the other guys.


I'm beginning to agree with the guy who was posting earlier...Modal
Displays, in general, suck.  Let the user-desired behavior just *not occur*,
with the reason why showing up in the stderr.

>Thats my two cents.
>
>Jeff Muller

Toss in as much change as you like.  I've already made a mess of the place
:-)