Re: Dropping the "Interface" tab from appearance capplet

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Tue, 2009-07-28 at 18:31 +0200, Frederic Crozat wrote:
> Le mardi 28 juillet 2009 à 16:40 +0100, Thomas Wood a écrit :
> > Hi,
[...]
> But relying on gconf-editor for those configuration options is clearly a
> UI regression.

Not really, when these options should not have been exposed in the first
place.

> 
> > However, before we remove the tab, I suggest we fix the default option
> > for the toolbar styles. I would like to see the default setting being
> > "Text beside icons". My reasoning is:
> > 
> > 1) This reduces the amount of vertical space uses in toolbars, allowing
> > more room for actual content
> 
> And it will eat a LOT of horizontal space instead : applications are
> often not confortable with 1024 width, it will be even worse.

Not true, because only a few buttons will have labels. Most of the
toolbar buttons in this mode do not get labels.


> 
> > 2) Important buttons are given a larger size than other buttons, meaning
> > better fitts-law for these buttons.
> 
> Longer text doesn't mean more important text (or I'm missing something).
> And it doesn't always work in non-english languages.

My point was that only the important buttons get text and icons,
therefore the important buttons are larger than less important buttons.

> 
> > 3) This seems to be a good compromise between "icons only" and "icons
> > and text"
> 
> I beg to differ on this.
> 
> Icon only is clearly not an option by default, since it is mostly for
> "expert" or "powerusers". So, the only "by default" options are "icons
> and text" and "text beside icons"

Again, "icons only" cannot possibly be an expert option. Toolbars are
supposed to be for commonly used commands, which you learn by looking at
tooltips (I think there are studies available to prove this, but I don't
remember where right now).

Regards,

Thomas