Re: User interface suggestions

[Pasi Pärnänen <pasi parnanen net>]

Jörg Rathlev:
> Just take a look at the screenshot (see link below) and compare the icons in
> the start menu with those of GIMP. Which are easier to recognize, easier to
> distinguish and (probably) easier to memorize?

[snip]

Calum Benson:
> The Windows Start menu may not be the world's greatest invention, but I
> usually find things on that a darn sight quicker than I ever do on the
> GNOME menu, and my Windows Start menu has a lot more stuff on it--
> that's partly down to organisation, but also because I can recognise the
> icons much more easily.


Distinctive icons are good, especially if they are kept graphically simple (so they scale well). I think that it has been proven that ideograms are faster to distinguish than words, and thus icons (that are very ideogram-like) should be faster than just menu item texts. I wonder why that isn't the case now. Maybe we should nick ideograms to use as icons? 

Speaking of menus...

I would like a icon-only menu with an array of icons that i could arrange myself. A sort of program palette with a changable size in multiplies of the icon size, perhaps. It could be a bit like a drawer, only 2D instead of 1D, and with no shrink-wrap effect... (I mean that in order to have groups of things there also has to be distance between them. The drawers don't have that.) If you think that the palette would take up too much screen estate then the palette could be a scrollable window to a much bigger palette, in pretty much the same way i've suggested for a two-dimensional file selector earlier. 

I just love the way i can press the middle key in Gimp and see more of an enlarged image, and i wish i could have that in other applications too, such as the file manager (GMC, GFM, Nautilus, whatever), e-mail clients, word processors, messaging clients and web browsers (being able to pointerpan like that would be an absolute blast in galeon).  I even think pointerpanning might be a "windows smasher" if we only do it right. It could make the work of both newbie and hacker much faster in gnome than in windows.  The only downside would be that the middle button would have to be reserved for pointerpanning. 

BTW, i think it would be a good thing to have a standard to what we are moving... Scrolling should, IMHO, always be done to the smaller object. In Gimp, scrolling should move the window, not the image.  In the file manager it should move the window, not the list. 


-- Pasi "inPasible" Parnanen
-- "oh shit, i'm being obnoxious again... i'm stopping now... sorry."


Dear Santa

My xmas wish this year is for a file selector with one column for each file type (if i want to) and pointerpanning to zoom around among those columns. I've tried to be a good boy most of the time, but...