Re: Dropping the "Interface" tab from appearance capplet

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 28 Jul 2009, at 16:40, Thomas Wood wrote:

> Hi,
>
> It has been suggested that we remove the interface tab from the
> Appearance capplet. This is for a number of reasons:
>
> 1) The tab mostly exposes bad design decisions
>
> 2) The tab page is fairly sparse and only contains three preferences

Bummer, we were going to use the Appearance tab as a handy place to  
add a new feature to the next release of OpenSolaris, but hey-ho :)

> A quick survey in the office seems to suggest the "text beside  
> icons" is
> the most popular choice for default.

I'm also a fan of text-beside-icons, but would just say that when we  
made it the default in OpenSolaris 2008.11, we received several  
complaints about apps that didn't implement it properly-- i.e. didn't  
set the is-important property for any toolbar buttons at all.  In many  
cases, no tooltips were provided either, so there was literally no way  
to get a description of a toolbar button other than by switching to a  
different toolbar mode.  Consequently, we reverted to text-below-icons  
for our 2009.06 release.  (And we should probably have filed more  
upstream bugs at the time -- my bad.)

To that end, I also suggested a GNOME Goal to ensure all apps worked  
well with text-beside-icons mode, but since it's still languishing on  
the Proposals page, I presume it hasn't happened as yet.  And it  
wouldn't necessarily help us with the many non-core GNOME apps that we  
all like to use.

It would probably also greatly help developers if you could set  
tooltips and the is-important property for each button in Glade's  
toolbar editor, which you couldn't the last time I looked-- but that  
was in v3.4.5, and things may have moved on a bit since then...

Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems