Re: GtkTreeView column-chooser dialog

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 18:44, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> Luis Villa <louie ximian com> writes:
> 
> > <nod> I'm sure it would be a nightmare to make accessible, but the
> > etable way of doing this seems much more intuitive to me.
> > Luis
> 
> [ Just so people know, the ETable approach is to have a dialog with a
>   list of items which you can then drag onto the header. ]
> 
> The ETable approach always felt clunky to me.  It is both inaccessible,
> and not obvious.

Obviously, accessibility is an issue, but as far as obviousness, it's
got a huge edge- it's just 'I want this column to go there, OK, I'll
drag, boom, it's there.' Your proposed UI really doesn't have any
relationship at all (visually) to what people are manipulating, and
that's clunky. 

FWIW, OS/X[1] does it (at least in mail.app) this way:
*to add/remove: just a simple checklist of available columns, so you
can't add/locate at the same time.
*to move around: drag side-to-side; no up/down movement possible.
Presumably this is keyboard accessible- select column header, use arrows
to move left/right. [i.e., like etable, but with no option to drag it
into space to remove it.]

As far as using/reusing this for menu editing, check out how menu
editing is done in HEAD epiphany or in OS/X. It's hard to prefer another
method once you've done it that way- it's just very, very obvious. [The
ephy implementation has one or two bugs I've been meaning to file, but
overall works well.]

Two cents from a non-hacker- feel free to tell me to shut up or
unsubscribe :)
Luis

[1]No, I haven't sold out, but a coworker (we'll call him 'joe') has. ;)

> > On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 17:56, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > > I find it mildly confusing that I have to move the columns up and down
> > > in the dialog, while I really want to move them left and right in the
> > > list...
> 
> Perhaps we can label it 'Swap Next' and 'Swap Previous'?
> 
> -Jonathan
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