Example: GnoRPM

["Wesley Felter" <wesf cs utexas edu>]

(James, I don't mean to pick on your app; you just happened to have a
screenshot, unlike many other GNOME apps.)

If we're going to talk about what GNOME apps should look like, maybe we
should start by looking at some existing GNOME apps. I don't have GNOME
installed (darn LinuxPPC), so I'm relying on screenshots. Anway, consider
GnoRPM:

<http://www.daa.com.au/~james/gnome/gnorpm-0.4.gif>

Overall, this app looks pretty good. The only thing that confuses me is the
labels on the buttons in the two dialog boxes on the right side of the
screen.

The top one has two buttons: Save and Close. I'm pretty sure that if I
pressed Save it would save any changes I had made to the dialog, but I don't
know if the dialog would close or not. Close also doesn't have a
well-defined meaning. If I Close the dialog without saving, are my changes
lost or saved? If it was called Cancel, I would know that it abandons my
changes and dismisses the dialog.

The bottom dialog is likewise confused. I know what the OK button does, and
I can predict what Apply does. Close is again ambiguous and I am curious
about why there is only a Help button in one dialog but not the others.
Luckily I don't think I would need any help for this app.

So apparently we need to come up with standard meanings for the words Save,
Close, OK, and Cancel.

Because I am not accustomed to this wm (fvwm?), I can't quite tell whether
"Package Info" is a window or a dialog box. If it is a window, it does not
need a Close button.

There's another oddity which appears to be due to Gtk: the Close button on
the "Package Info" window is not as tall as all the other buttons on the
screen. I would guess that Gtk makes all the buttons in one row the same
size and large enough to accomodate the largest icon in them. The only way
around this that I can think of is to make the X icon a little bigger.

And remember, I mean all of this as constructive feedback. Together we can
make GNOME kick ass even more than it already does. :-)

Wesley Felter - wesf@cs.utexas.edu