Re: Bugs & Probs with the panel.

[Caolan McNamara <Caolan McNamara ul ie>]

On 28-May-98 Tom Tromey wrote:
>[ internationalization of icons ]
>
>>> Maybe this is only a theoretical problem.  Anybody know for sure?
>
>Ulrich> It's a real problem and you might want consider to
>Ulrich> internationalize the icons.  I.e., use symbolic names.  I
>Ulrich> don't remember the details anymore but there is some quite
>Ulrich> interesting example which came up in the past where a
>Ulrich> completely innocently looking picture is insulting for
>Ulrich> somebody else.
>
>It turns out we already have an example in Gnome!  It isn't as
>dramatic as insulting somebody, but it does exist.
>
>Right now the OK icon is an arrow pointing down and to the left.  I
>imagine this is supposed to mimic the Enter key on the keyboard.
>However, when using a right-to-left language, the arrow should point
>down and to the right.
>
>We don't support right-to-left languages yet, so practically speaking
>it doesn't matter right now.  But some day it will.
related to this theres some fascinating material on internalisation as regards 
colour as well, some colours such as red and green are not instantenously
recognizable as danger/halt and ok/go and so on and on occasion can cause 
real problems. id recommend the apple interface guideline book as a good read 
to get a handle on some of these issues. worth a read for its own sake, 
another little HCI gotcha is menus, if theres more entries on the menu than 
fits on the screen there should be the capacity to scroll the menu so that you
can select any of the entries, you can see that xaw doesnt have any
cunning way to do this so for instance on my machine with loads
of fonts i cant select past the ones beginning with c with xfontsel as they 
are listed in a menu thats too long to fit on screen. i havent tried
any long menus in gtk yet, does it have a scroll mechanism ?, or like
netscapes motif menus an automatic break menu into multiple menus
linked with a cascade menu entry at the end of the menu, which is a
rather niftier mechanism. 

C.

Real Life: Caolan McNamara           *  Doing: MSc in HCI
Work: Caolan.McNamara@ul.ie          *  Phone: +353-61-202699
URL: http://skynet.csn.ul.ie/~caolan *  Sig: an oblique strategy
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