Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor

[Arnaud Charlet <charlet ACT-Europe FR>]

> It's interesting that you choose an IDE as an example, because I think

That's because this is an area I know very well :-)

> 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.

Right, and this is why I find it "funny" at best, or "misguided" at worst
when each time people ask about MDI, then someone on a gtk list answers
that MDI are "bad". Although this may be true in many cases, it is by
no means an absolute rules.

I believe the MDI widget provided in GtkAda 2.0 is a pretty powerful and
flexible one, which allows you to have either floating, or tabbed, or top
level windows, letting the user decided, depending on how they work.

If we've designed this widget, that's because our IDE needs it, based on
user's expectations and requirements.

> 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.  

Actually I agree that being able to easily have many toolbar, and being
able to move them around and remove them provides a good chunk of
flexibility. One could almost argue that you could have one toolbar
per button, and then have the equivalent of a fully features toolbar editor
(that's not a serious suggestion :-)

> 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 :)

Sure, in the case of your needs and of this particular software, you're
saying this feature is almost useless, that's fine. It's hard to generalize
this view to other users and other software though.

Arno