RE: [Usability] Re: [Fwd: Re: Your final comments on gswitchit in 2.4...]

[Murray Cumming Comneon com]

> From: Sergey V. Oudaltsov [mailto:sergey.oudaltsov@clients.ie] 
> Hi all
> 
> Ugh, there was a day yesterday in these mailing lists... 
> Great thanks to
> everybody for participating (though I am not saying "everybody's at
> ease":). I hope now, when we've almost finished the discussion of the
> way gswitchit should look and feel - we'll solve fast all the 
> remaining
> little question, won't we?:)
> 
> Just to show the way it looks now:
> 
> http://gswitchit.sourceforge.net/newxkb.png

OK. It looks better, but there is unfortunately still a long way to go. And
as you make it simpler, you will get yet more comments until it is perfect.
But I do suggest that you wait to hear the release-team's decision. As I
said before, I don't know the details but various GNOME hackers seem to be
interested in merging some of gswitchit's functionality into other GNOME
modules.

> There is now "Show advanced keyboard parameters" toggle button which
> effectively turns on/off tabs "Options 1/2" (again, better names for
> them are welcome).

1. "Show advanced options" is probably better than "Show advanced keyboard
parameters".
2. A button that adds tabs should probably be outside of the Notebook rather
than in one of the tabs. Likewise, the Custom/Global toggle.
3. I guess this is what we want to use the disclosure triangle for. It's not
in GTK+ 2.2, but the Actions/Run Program feature seems to
   do this somehow.
4. Lots of people will tell you that these advanced options shouldn't even
exist. For instance, they might be removed from Actions/Run Program. I'm
just warning you. I'm not the guy to discuss that with.

Another point:
1. Shouldn't the list of layouts be a TreeView with Add/Remove buttons. Are
we really limited/fixed to 4 layouts. It seems odd to have "unset" layouts
showing. This would also remove the duplicated ... and Clear buttons.
 
> The only open question for this capplet is
> whether keyboard preview is necessary

It sounds useful, but it should be automatically updated.

> Do we
> skip support for XFree < 4.3.0 (which I'd be happy to do) and remove
> flag chooser

That sounds like the simplest solution - just remove flags completely and
use the layout ID.

I hope you are enjoying this.

Murray Cumming
murrayc@usa.net
www.murrayc.com