Re: UI hiccups...

[thristian atdot org]

On Sat, Dec 16, 2000 at 10:48:40AM +1300, Michael Adams wrote:
> what effort is going into solving some of the major problems in gnome's ui?
> 
> For example, the hierachial menus. Under the mac, you can bring up a menu,
> then drag *diagonally* to the menu item you want, without the menu changing
> to something else. Under gnome and windows, you have to move across, then
> down to the item you want. Not nice.

Apparently fixed in the next release of GTK+. Kudos to the developer
who acquired sanity. :)

> Also, under the gnome-panel-global-menu, if you accidentally click on the
> wrong item, but think you can correct the problem by dragging down, you end
> up picking up the item. actually, I tried that just now to check and gmc
> crashed! aaarrrrggghhh! This really isn't good. think about the poor mac
> users who end up dragging all their menus around and crashing gmc etc...

Copied from Win98, of course, and I'll say it again - a menu is a very
poor primary interface for starting programs, because menus should be
quick, ephemeral things, and you don't have the UI materials for
manipulation. MacOS Classic doesn't *have* a UI for "every application
on your system", you explore the filesystem. Win3.1 was nice, having a
manipulable set of categorised icons, where icons could be selected
for editing purposes as well as opened. 

I think a much better idea would be a nice tree-list, because you can
do all the same sort of drag-and drop operations, you can select an
item without opening it.. and I should probably have a look how much
shell functionality (editing a .desktop file, for example) is provided
in gnomelibs..

> Also, why is mouse cursor hard coded into the panel? try this... 
>  $ xsetroot -cursor_name right_ptr
> Now, what do you see in all gnome windows? what do you see in the panel?
> Why?

More annoyingly, why does the cursor change to a lefty-arrow whenever
I open a menu? It's a particularly ugly arrow, too, and I don't see
the purpose of it.

> How about alpha drop shadows under cursors, ala Windows 2000 and troll
> tech's Palmtop Environment. Oh, while i'm talking about the mouse, how
> about reversing the pointer so it has a black border and a white inside. 3d
> pointers out of the question?

The X11 protocol takes two bitmaps for a cursor, no pixmaps or
alphachannels. I don't know if RENDER does anything about this.

> Finally, how about a mac menu bar. You know, the menu bar accross the top
> thing. Why? do i need to go into this? (Fitt's law applies here.) I mean,
> shouldn't be too hard to do. Every app has a gnome_menu_bar defined doesn't
> it? just patch gnome-libs so it displays at the top of the screen, while
> the window has the focus.

I'd love it. It's been discussed a lot before, but nothing ever seems
to come of it. :(

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