Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] yet another new mockup (meta)

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Mon, 2003-05-12 at 23:14, Jorn Baayen wrote:
> > > But we can use a text label. We just have to find rather short labels
> > > and then make the button as large as the largest of those labels. This
> > > is already commonly done in Gtk dialogs to provide more consistent
> > > button spacing (see the close confirmation in gedit). If we use somewhat
> > > smart short labels and a longer descriptive tooltip AND a descriptive
> > > icon, it should work very well. "Burn a CD" (or "Burn to CD), "Rip from
> > > CD", "New/Create Playlist" (or "VPlaylist" maybe) and "Show/Hide
> > > Browser" would work very well for example. Certainly a _lot_ better than
> > > a simple icon and I also like the idea of such a meta button very much.
> > > :)
> > 
> > Heres something i worked out on this:
> > 
> > Buttons we would need and their char count:
> > 
> > New Playlist:  12
> > Burn to CD:  10
> > Rip from CD:  11
> > Add Station:  11
> > Show Browser: 12
> > Hide Browser: 12
> > 
> > the last two are null and void with your mockup, which i happen to like a
> > lot.
> > 
> > As you can see from my listing, there is only a maximum of a two char
> > difference.  if you make the button as big as the largest of those, right
> > justify test, and left justify the icon then there would be no
> > rearanging/resizing of things and it would look pretty nice IMO.  the only
> > problem with this is of course other languages.
> 
> Really, this is only the case for English, so we really can't do this. 

We can! :)
Translators have the same issue with toolbar item captions, why should
it be any more difficult to find somewhat short terms for this button.
The only thing we have to do is to make the button as large as the
largest possible label. We don't need to make them all the same width
(the labels), that's why I mentioned the close confirmation dialog of
gedit. Notice that "Save" and "Cancel" have space around them so the
buttons are the same width as "Don't save". As long as translators
wouldn't use rediculous long labels for any of the actions, it will look
just fine. 
It is certainly not a good enough reason to drop this neat and useful
idea IMHO.

Daniel
(I'm from Germany btw, so I'm not just egoistically ignoring non-us
languages ;))