Re: User interface suggestions

["Guillermo S. Romero / Familia Romero" <famrom idecnet com>]

aferrer dit upm es (2000-11-12 at 1946.13 +0100):
> * New look in the menus. Looking for a more clear interface, I've added
> icons in the top menu, and titles & a bit of innovation in the lists of
> items. Items in bold will be the most used ones.

You killed the dettach widget, and some people use it cos they found
it, not cos was hidden or removed. I suppose your solution would be
that title will be become the dettach controler, and that dettached
menus will not have window manager decors, thus being unable to do
some window ops with them (minimize or keyboard focus, for example),
and only being able to close them with the added arrow they have in
current implementation, or maybe a new close button in title. Dunno it
that is nice, I like currently dettachable system.

Some other things, like colors, lines or effects are theme based, and
you will not be able to control them. What about if the theme font is
bold already? What font is used for the headers, knowing that user
chose one base font, not multiple?

> * Items in the desktop. Most used ones (CD-ROM, XMMS, Mozilla) are in
> bold, other un normal font.

Do they change as they are used? What will you tell a user when he
asks why an icon changed its font "magically"? Surprise. We have
people that find icon changes weird, imagine then: "My CDROM icon has
changed name again, and now is bold font too". Does the change worth
the surprise?

> * Taskbar. Iconified tasks are more lighted (like theirs icons), "[]"
> deleted.

That look like disabled buttons, not iconified windows, and you should
keep consistency with the rest of GUI (disabled buttons do nothing if
you click them). The "[]" are fine, IMO. What is more, I would like
that windows in other desktops appeared as "()", like in Sawfish menu,
which is more informative ("ooh, no, we use text to give info, bad
GSR, this is GUI, only color and icons are valid" :P ). The same rule
could be applied to the Sawfish task like when cycling, btw (Sawfish
with Ugliness module, I mean).

> Oh yes, and the apple in the center of the topbar launches the
> "gnome-about" program :).

You should use another thing, I remember Apple got pissed about the
apple in some themes. I know, this apple is not Apple's, but better be
safe. A mushroom maybe? GNOMEs, forest, trees... mushrooms. But, in
the functionality area, why gnome-about? Do people check it daily?
Will it become the small helper system proposed weeks ago vs the
current limited three buttons and scrool area?

GSR