gnome-utils 2.9.1 -- grand plans for gfloppy / fighting the Devious Takeover Plan (tm)

[James Bowes <bowes cs dal ca>]

Hi all,

In an effort to add cd blanking [1] to gfloppy, I've been working on a
bit of a rewrite. Adding support for a different media type is
complicating things a bit for me, so I'd welcome any input at all, even
from those sneaky gnome-applets people.

In my current design, selecting a different drive type from the 'Drive'
combo box will alter the list of displayed options so that they are
applicable to the selected drive type. This means that a single window
is used for the 3 different drive types (regular floppies, usb floppies
[which have fewer options], optical drives), and a user may freely
switch between drives types in a single instance of the window.
Screenshots: [2], [3], [4]

So, here is my little list of issues:

- What do we call it? 'Floppy Formatter' doesn't make sense for the
window title (since it can do more than format floppies), so I've been
using 'Formatter' for now. I suppose the title could change based on the
media type...

- Is it ok to alter the UI so drastically based on a combo box
selection?

- Right now the icon for the format button changes based on the media
type selected, should the window icon do the same? and, is this ok to
begin with?

- The 'Format' button label does not change, since that would probably
be bad from a usability standpoint (what with accelerators and all,
too). Should it be labelled something else instead?


[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=120928
[2] http://flame.cs.dal.ca/~bowes/floppy.png
[3] http://flame.cs.dal.ca/~bowes/floppy-expanded.png
[4] http://flame.cs.dal.ca/~bowes/cdrom.png

-- 
James Bowes <bowes cs dal ca>