[gnome-love] Re: Applets

[Knut Neumann <knut neumann uni-duesseldorf de>]

On Die, 2001-08-21 at 13:53, Calum Benson wrote:
> We're in the process of putting together a more formal team for
> suggesting/implementing UI improvements, starting with writing a
> styleguide (at last!), but it's not quite there yet.
>
> I'd suggest that if you know which applets you'd like to work on, you
> could post a message to usability gnome org to let us know, or join the

Ok. Here is the my thoughts on it (took a few days). I am cross-posting
it, to gnome-love and gnome-devel as it might be of interest there as
well:

IMHO there are two sorts of UI improvements that could be made to the
applets. 

The first is some kind of polishing, as some of applets simply do not
fit into the actual panel style. Eg the default clock applet, the
pad-size (distance between carved box around the text and edge of panel)
of which differs from the one used by the pager or the gnome-icu applet.
Or the design of the mixer-applet which could be quite more like the
gnome-icu applet (imagine a speaker-icon instaed of the monitor icon). I
am aware that there are people who migth as well want the other applets
to be adapted to the mixer-applet design or just want different designs,
as they like the actual ones...I will come back to this issue later. 

The second one is some sort of usability improvement. For example some
applets do not work with some panel sizes (xmms-applet), some do
provide themeability and some do not. The adoption of panel-size should
be the very expected behaviour, so every applet should either fit in, or
warn the user (if not at all possible) that it might screw up the
panel-size). The themeability to me seems as well as something the user
might expect (if you can theme your clock, and theme your esound-monitor
to lets say radar-blue, why cant you have your mixer-applet fit
in?)...and to have themeability of applets might solve the
problem-of-taste mentioned in the first improvement suggestion above. On
the other side this can mean a terrible overhead to implement even if
you do it by somehow using libglade.

I would like to discuss these issues, so feel free to send me _your_
favorite ui design ideas. On the other hand - if that makes sense to
someone but me - I would sit down and write up a list of all available
applets from gnome-applets regarding the following points:

(1) What can be done to make this applet gnome-1.4-panel-design
compatible?
(2) What can be done to improve the usability of this applet?

I could then post the list for discussion and one could assign tasks
from it then (kind of like the ui-squad-webpage I remember from older
days).

-Knut