Re: combo rant

[Gus Koppel <gtk spamkiller bytechase cx>]

control H wrote:

> > Well, I must admit that I haven't used Windows more than occasionaly
> > for the last three or four years, but the last time I checked,
> > Windows combo box was much _worse_ than GTK+'s, in my opinion.  You
> > would often get a five-line combo where you'd have to scroll like
> > hell to skip all those 200 items to get to the one you want.
>
> Ok it certainly sucks when you have to scroll those 200 items within a
> five-line combo. But that's part of the programmers job I think. At
> least you are able to force a five-line combo on Windows! And that's
> what I miss. A function where you can scale such things, as I stated
> in my original email.

In other words, you miss function(s) to make the UI suck to users?

The problem with such functions is that many programmers are not just
happy about their existence but unhesitatingly (mis)use them to create
UIs that suck, indeed. The pretty common 500-items-3-lines combobox in
Windows is a good example for this. While the programmer may be happy
for having achieved exactly what he wanted to, the users of those
applications have to suffer from such mislead efforts.

I am personally happy that GTK+ tries to make it significantly harder
for programmers to reduce usability of applications / GUIs in ways which
are rather common on i.e. native Windows applications. Due to its open
source nature and extensibility nearly nothing is impossible to achieve
in GTK+. However, such sort of restriction functions which give the
programmer more control at the expense of usability (user's happiness)
require significantly more efforts by programmers. Efforts which most
programmers should rather invest in improving or extending their
applications rather than restricting the UIs.