Re: GEP 6: Toolbar

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Daniel Egger wrote:

> >   2. use a different toolbar style, such as "icons only", or the
> >      proposed "priority text" style.
> >    
>
> You must be kidding. I'm not talking about me having problems with
> menus but general usability issues which should be taken seriously.
> If some translation (or worse: the original text) doesn't even fit
> into my non-standard 1152px wide screen this is definitely a problem
> for many users, especially with smaller screens or larger fonts. I
> can also imagine that this might be an accessibility issue but obviously
> am not the right person to comment on that. 
>  
The default toolbar style (icon with text label below) takes up a fair 
amount of space, and only the both_horiz style takes up more horizontal 
space.  As all the buttons are set to homogeneous size (having all the 
toolbar buttons at different sizes looks pretty bad), one long label can 
make a toolbar unusable.

This is why I was suggesting that you try a different toolbar style. 
The purpose of most toolbar buttons should be obvious from their icon, 
in which case icons only mode works well.  The "priority text" style, 
which can be used to make some of the non obvious items more obvious, or 
make frequently used items easier to hit.  I didn't mean it as a joke. 
Whether the default toolbar style should be changed is outside the 
scope of this GEP though.

The overflow section of the GEP recognises that there _will_ be cases 
where a toolbar overflows (small screen, user resizes window, large 
fonts in use, bad application with too many toolbar items, etc), and it 
should be handled gracefully.  We don't want to be in a situation where 
the window can't be resized to fit on the screen.

James.

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