Re: [Usability] UI guidelines and the libraries

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org> writes: 
> Can you be more specific about what you mean?

I was just responding to the recent thread about GtkDialog, rather
than any specifics of the HIG. The only specific is the small gap
between the secondary buttons and the two primary buttons - since the
set_secondary we implemented seems to be about fully left-justifying
the help button. I'm not sure you could currently implement that
little gap.

> As far as I know, all of
> the HIG's recommendations can be implemented with GtkDialog. If there
> are any that can't be, we would probably want to revise the HIG.
> 
> The recommendations for alerts can't be implemented with
> GtkMessageDialog. But that's just thin syntactic sugar over GtkDialog,
> right?

Yup.

> I agree with your point generally (see below). But I think the cost of
> people rolling their own alerts out of GtkDialog is outweighed by the
> usability benefit of meaningful button labels. Developers could even
> use a cut & pasted utility class, or one in a non-platform utility
> library.

Agree, it's fine to have stuff that requires small hacks (especially
if implementation notes are included). Just not stuff that requires
serious reimplementation, or really harmful-in-other-ways hacks.

I don't mean to make a huge issue, just wanted to be sure we were
clear on this point.

Havoc