Re: Unwanted behavior with menu item accelerators

[January Weiner 3 <jweiner1 ix urz uni-heidelberg de>]

Hi,

> Well, if you hang out on gnome-accessibility-list, you'll meet at least
> one  :o)

OK, point taken.

> A very valid point, and would never suggest we should just copy another
> desktop just for the hell of it.  Unfortunately though, when it comes to
> GUIs, "a little different" is often more confusing than "a lot
> different"...

Hm. It's just I am afraid that this nice feature will get somehow
forgotten. I fear the MacOS syndrom, the kind of intuitivity you have when
the user can easily discover all of the capabilities of the interface mostly
because there are so few. If I needed such a system I wouldn't be using
anything but Mac; however, if I need a couple of tools to work with each day
for a few years then I would like to adapt it as much I can to my needs.

> > The user should be given the possibility of creating a custom shortcut
> > without any effort for any menu option/entry he would like to. If he messes
> > up, so what? 
>
> Now, there's a question we could probably argue about the answer to for

Let's do it :-) Questions "how you do this" and "how you do that" is one
aspect, but I think the issue of automatic shortcut keys and the usability
of an interface belongs to "gtk development".

> the rest of the week :o)  My personal view: a well-designed GUI doesn't
> ever let you mess up, unless you really try very hard.  Experiment yes,
> mess up, no. (And yes, there's a fine line between the two!)  

OK. A fine line. Exactly. I could say that I haven't seen such an
application yet :-) In my opinion, there is only one thing that can prevent
messing smth up really, and this is a regular backup of all versions of
whatever you are working on. Everything else you can reinstall :-). I don't
know of any undo's working really well, maybe with the notable exception
(to some extent) of Adobe Photoshop. But I know what you mean.

> If you do mess up, you should be able to get back to a non-messed-up
> state with the minimum of effort... can you easily Undo a
> mistakenly-changed menu accelerator in a gtk application?  Not really,
> as far as I know, unless you happen to remember what the previous
> accelerator was.  

Well, so what? You just type something that comes to your mind, and *this*
will be a truly intuitive shortcut. But OK, that's a point, there should be
a way of restoring default keystrokes other then closing the program and
editing your gtkrc or however this file is called (although this solution
is both logical and easy for me, and I am writing my programs mostly for
myself).

> But if you've changed it by mistake, you're unlikely
> to have been paying attention to details like that, whether you're blind
> or not  :o)

Well. If I were blind, I would stay away from Linux :-( Even though I'm
not, I sometimes ask myself "why on Disc am I using this braindamaged
system?! This is not for a person writing in non-latin-1 (Abiword crashes
whenever it sees a single letter from latin-2) fonts and trained in a thing
as simple as molecular biology!" (trouble is, everything else is even more
braindamaged, so I stay with the known evil). 

> That is certainly one solution to the problem that would work not too
> badly. But you could also argue that it's a bit like the animated Start
> arrow on the taskbar in M$ Windows-- adding a whole new GUI element to
> cover up for the inadequacies of the orginal one  :o)

I don't know about the animated arrow, never seen it. Another solution
would be an entry "restore previous settings" or, which would be more then
intuitive for me -- for the first thing I do with a program is start it
with the '-h' option -- to have a CLI option "--skip_the_shortcuts" or
something similar. BTW, what are the possible options which get parsed by
gtk_init?

> I quite agree, just blindly copying stuff from elsewhere isn't the way
> to innovate.  Sometimes though, it would be nice if people thought
> through the consequences of their cool new features a little further
> before we all adopted them  :o)

I agree, though I still have to think through the consequences of what I
just said. OTOH, I really only care whether a feature suits me, and I don't
care much whether this feature will make Linux more popular or not. Sorry.
I care more about the popularity of movies made by Jim Jarmush or Bach
played by Glenn Gould.

> I'm sure Havoc will be able to tell us how it works-- I agree it will
> only really work well if can switch the feature on/off dynamically for
> all apps on your desktop, from the control center or something.  Or
> perhaps on a per-application basis.

I would be really happy if all programs made with gtk used this feature at
least as an option. Currently, most of them does not let you save your
shortcuts.
 
> That's alright, they were designed by the ergonomists in our hardware
> group, I have nothing to do with them  :o)

:-) Note that usability for me is, for example, "having bash in /bin and
the full set of GNU tools".

> Well, there are links to some pretty comprehensive reading lists and
> good UI design websites on the GNOME Usability Project website: 
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/references.html

That is where I found the HIG. I did not find the rest of the resources
particularly interesting or profound, but I skipped a few.

> Of the websites it points to, the User Interface Hall of Shame is
> particularly worth a visit! 

There are some nice examples... for things you will find in the HIG, which
is a very fine manual and I would really be happy if Apple cared a little
more about things written there while creating its applications and OS
("Application terminated because Error 13 occured" is mentioned in the HIG
as a negative example of an error message).

> - "GUI Design for Dummies" (Laura Arlov, IDG) -- yes, seriously!
> - "User and Task Analysis for Interface Design" (Hackos+Redish, Wiley)--
> heavy stuff!
> - "Handbook of Usability Testing" (Jeff Rubin, Wiley)-- very readable
> - "Designing Visual Interfaces" (Mullet+Sano, Prentice-Hall)-- very
> pretty :o)

Hm, I'll take a look at the prices. I make money with genetic alterations
made in bacteria (jj :-) ) and not with programming, so I have always a
problem buying a book on that topic.

Cheers,
j.

----)-\//-///-----------------------------------January-Weiner-3-------
> Dobry dowcip to jednak nie jest to samo, co DNA (chocby dlatego, ze DNA
> nie ma puenty). [ WO ]