Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 15:24, Arnaud Charlet wrote:

> 
> And again, this will not necessarily scale for complex applications.
> Take for instance an IDE with various buttons: some users will never need
> the cut/copy/paste buttons (because they use the short cuts).
> Some users will never needs the debugger buttons (e.g. because they debug
> using printf or the command line).

It's interesting that you choose an IDE as an example, because I think
there's some consensus (well, at least among the usability people I've
spoken to, both in GNOME and at Sun) that IDEs are kind of a special
case-- they're probably one of the few applications where MDI usually
makes more sense than any other window model, for example.

Even still, most of the IDEs I've used have one toolbar per "function"
(text editing, debugging, compiling etc.) and I just turned the ones I
wanted on or off, I never felt the need to add or remove individual
buttons to each toolbar.  

For that matter, in my 10 years+ of using MS Word, I've rarely so much
as undocked a toolbar, let alone edited one.  Although I do turn on the
Drawing toolbar occasionally-- I have to get my excitement from
somewhere :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems