Re: Style Guide suggestion

["Oskar Liljeblad" <osk hem passagen se>]

From: Maciej Stachowiak <mstachow@mit.edu>

>Trying to capture the rough consensus I have seen here, I suggest we
>add these style guide entries for now:
>
>* Every Gnome app that has a toolbar should provide a
>Preferences... menu entry that calls up a dialog that has a set of
>radio buttons to select one of: "Pictures and Text", "Pictures only"
>or "Text only" (style guide maintainer: feel free to
>s/Pictures/Images/g if you think that's more intuitive).

Once again, what if an application have multiple toolbars and you want them
to look different? I think independent configuration of each toolbar is
important and gives the application a dynamic feel.

You might say that since our common apps one have one toolbar, let's just
put the options in the Preferences box... Since being consistent is
important in UIs, there should be no exceptions for multiple-toolbar
applications.

If Gnome/GTK supplied a way to change toolbars (for example, with RMB popup
menus), the application wouldn't (not initially at least) have to mess with
it. (Provided that it checked the type of toolbar upon Options saving, and
set it upon startup.)

>* Every Gnome app that has a toolbar should provide tooltips for each
>toolbar button, and for other controls on the toolbar if appropriate.

Agreed.

>* Every Gnome app that has a toolbar should allow you to turn the
>tooltips on and off through the Preferences dialog with a checkbutton
>labelled "Tooltips on".

Tooltips are such a fundamental thing, that their behavior should be
controlled from a global program. (Such "behavior" settings are display
delay in milliseconds, and whether they are displayed or not.)

>Once we get that going, we can add a way to set these preferences
>Gnome-wide, and gradually add the other optional GUI settings that are
>largely matters of taste.

We can still do that now, nothing has to be done in special order. And there
should be nothing wrong in constantly changing the style guide (just not
*too* often), taken that the change was necessary to keep UI consistency.

Oskar Liljeblad (osk@hem.passagen.se)