Re: notes on combo boxes

[Joel Becker <jlbec evilplan org>]

On Thu, Aug 03, 2000 at 11:28:20PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> It's sort of unclear what the hell a combo box actually is, because it
> blurs with option menu. In fact Qt uses a combo box with an "editable"
> flag, where an ineditable combo is just an option menu. For GTK, if
> someone wants a widget that displays a fixed set of uneditable strings
> to choose from, we want them to use GtkOptionMenu. The PixmapCombo is
> also really an option menu, but because of the way GtkMenu works the
> grid of images is much easier to implement in this combo framework
> than it would be as an option menu.

	While working on the NIC (www.thinknic.com), we target new
computer users.  One of the biggest issues folks are having is with the
OptionMenu.  In this case, it is Netscape's Motif widget, but the GTK+
widget is of the same design, namely:

,--------------------.
| Some text here  -- |
`--------------------'

	There have been many complaints that it isn't ituitive what it
does.  It doesn't quite look like a menu, and doesn't quite look like
anything else.  On the other hand, they find the non-editable combo box
(aka "drop-down box") a much easier to intuit metaphor.
	The non-Unix world has had the "drop-down box" for a long time.
In some literature (at least OS/2), the "drop-down box" means the
non-editable one, and the "combo box" is the editable one.  This is the
behavior that Swing and Qt use, as well as OS/2 and Win32 (probably
win16 too, though I don't remember).
	It also has the advantage of not getting bigger than the screen
when there are too many entries, because of the list nature.
	I'm not necessarily advocating the elimination of the OptionMenu
(or changing it's look to be a "drop-down box"), but I do want to point
out that if GTK+/Gnome are meant to be intuitive to the new user and
expert alike, this is something to notice.  People coming from the
windows world especially will understand the "drop-down box"
immediately, and this is why, I suspect, Gnumeric has read-only combos
as well.

Joel

-- 

"If at first you don't succeed, cover all traces that you tried."
                                                        -Unknown

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