Re: Enter the build sheriff: Jacob.

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

> I do think Seth has better UI judgment than most of us Alan, with all
> due respect. ;-) The UI team has made a huge overall improvement to

I've worked with *good* UI people in the gaming world. Seth seems to be
mostly a reciter of other peoples work without doing research and good
UI lab testing and study.

Lets take the Macintosh

You delete a file by dragging it into the waste bin
You eject a disk by .... dragging it into the waste bin

When quoting other work you need to remember four things or you'll never
get it right

#1 	Version one of most high quality UI programs was not written by
	a UI wizard. Some things ended up stuck in the design that
	they dearly wish they could bury

#2	A lot of stupid layout was done to avoid the whole Apple v Everyone
	look and feel lawsuits. Thats why some people have icons on the
	right not the left, the entire affair of the trashcan on desktop and
	so forth. A lot of UI design occurred that was driven by lawyer not
	human interface constraints

#3	Hardware changed. Mac menus are a wonderful example. With a tiny
	screen they are at the top of it, on a big screen thats dire. Apple
	finally changed that but also very smartly realised that the top
	menu means users can always find general things (which is why the
	ximian menu panel goes down so well - the foot requires knowledge
	the menu panel provides the knowledge in the environment

#4	99% of UI design predates computing. The yes before no thing is
	pre computing world just like sort order. The positive leads the
	negative. Yes/No never No/Yes in forms [locale dependant of course]

You are also too close to the project to see the problems. You must feed
Gnome 2.0 final (ish) to people who are going straight from 1.4. You'll
see deep annoyance at the dialogs without any understanding of why it
irritates them. Take 30 people into a lab and try it some day.

> I agree with you, but occasionally disagreeing with the UI team is the
> price of having a consistent UI. As long as we don't have really
> fundamental disagreements about the overall goals of the thing.

We won't have a consistent UI. Remember you are going to support 1.4 and 2.0
at the same time. Oh dear now my dialog boxes are in random order.

Most of what Seth has done seems to be in the right direction. I'd dearly
like to see a post-seth sawfish capplet for example. 

Anyway since its a free software project I can ensure a yes/no ordered
gnome exists. Furthermore I would imagine after UI testing that both Red Hat
and Ximian are likely to use Yes/No ordering too. At least if they actually
do any.

Alan
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