Re: [Usability]one-persion usability study

[Sunnanvind Fenderson <sunnanvind fenderson com>]

I forget whether we were talking on-list or off-list. Yeah, I'm very
forgetful and I haven't really learned gnus well enough to grok the
"to-fields" yet.

Calum Benson <calum benson sun com> writes:
> Right click on the image, and you get virtually (but not quite, which is
> equally annoying!) the whole menu structure though, not just stuff
> relevant to the current selection.  Things like "File->Open" just don't
> belong there... 

I think they do, though. To open an image, you should click on an image.

> or if they do, then so do things like "File->Acquire",
> which is nowhere to be seen.

I agree with this, I think this should be added and the "menu bar" on
the toolbox is abomination, everything should be available from the
right-click menu.

I don't care strongly about this though, I think that the most
beautiful still is "menubar on top of screen" (or bottom, whatever,
just some *place* instead of in the window).

I'm quite curious to see how it would work with my suggested "sloppy
focus but focus switches only when the mouse cursor is still for .x
seconds" idea.

> You could hack it to use sloppy focus, and it worked just as well.  As
> soon as you held down the right mouse button, the menu bar 'locked on'
> to the menus for that application.  So it didn't matter which other
> applications you crossed on your way to the menu bar, as long as you
> continued to hold down the right mouse button.  You had to do this
> whether you used sloppy focus or not, so there was nothing new to learn.

Oh, yeah, now I see how it was. Yeah, it worked really good but I
don't think it would work good with usability studies, it doesn't seem
very obvious. I'd prefer something like that to what there is now,
though.

> > Now nautilus has something weird where "hide" options change to "show"
> > which I guess is better, but I just have to get used to it.
> 
> We're still undecided about that in the GNOME UI guidelines, actually...
> personally I think I'd rather just see a checkbox for standard things
> like View->Menubar and View->Toolbar, although there are cases where
> 'mutable' menu items like you describe are useful.

I don't feel strongly in the matter. Emotionally and aesthetically I
like how nautilus is doing it now, it feels like the Right Thing,
"eyewise" I like checkboxes since they're easily spottable/gettable
*once you've understood them* (which is not always the case).

> > How do you change focus to the panel from the keyboard?
> 
> In metacity, it's Ctrl-Alt-Tab.  In Sawfish there is no default
> keybinding, but you can set it up in the Sawfish shortcuts dialog.

Okay. I do use metacity for my gnome testing, so that's nice.  (More
questions - how do you "right click" on active applets from the
keyboard?)

I tried "clicking" on Wanda from the keyboard by C-A-Tab:ing and then
tabbing to Wanda and then hitting enter. Not exactly the fastest or
nicest way, especially if you're using something to help you with
chording keys.

One of the advantages with using the keyboard for a lot of stuff is
that hitting C-n is often faster than choosing (for example) "File ->
new" by hand, once you learn it.

Then again, if you *were* clicking Wanda all the time you'd probably
set up a shortcut key for her, so ignore this rant.

(I'm using gnome with the swedish locale and Wanda's tooltip says
"Gnome-fisken, siaren" which makes me very happy and bubbly to read,
it just feels so 'cute' in a way. The swedish translation of gnome is
excellently cute, it really won my heart.)