Re: Window controls for GNOME 3

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 11:31 AM, Federico Mena Quintero <federico gnome org> wrote:

On Wed, 2011-02-23 at 16:34 -0500, Marina Zhurakhinskaya wrote:

> While the close operation is common, it's not frequent, and therefore
> might not require visual representation on-screen all the time.

Huh, I use the Close button pretty frequently.  I guess I'm still
scarred from when Esc didn't work in every dialog by default.

Me too.  I don't do file->quit since it's a lot easier to access the close button.  But not all apps behave the same unfortunately.

 

> Both the application menu in the top bar and the close buttons in the
> overview are well discoverable. Right now, the application menu has
> one Quit option, and the user actually needs to make a decision
> whether they want to fully quit the application with all its windows
> before going for that option. Having both Quit and Close Window (if
> applicable) options in that menu would inform the user of the choice
> they have and allow to use that feature as the central way of closing
> a window or an application.

My main problem with removing the Close button is a combination of
things:

- The Close button is relevant to a single window.  It's nicely *in* the
window right now.  Your proposal would put it far away from the window
(thus losing context), and would make it not immediately visible (you'd
need to open the app menu first - probably discoverable, as you say, but
far from obvious).  My experience with non-technical users (say, my
wife) is that if they don't see something on the screen, they won't know
that that something is actually available.

There are some apps where using the "quit" button won't make sense.  Terminals being the foremost one.  I believe for gnome-terminal they are still using the same factory so a quit on terminal it remove all terminals, right?

As a new user I think I would feel pretty intimidated if I got a bunch of windows that didn't have a close button.  It would require some training for them to use the other method because just about every other UI out there uses a close button and is an established UI.  Combined with the fact that there are exceptions like the terminal, I think that would lead to some confusion.

sri