[Usability]Re: toolbar issues

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Guys,

On Tue, 2002-05-21 at 03:40, Alex Larsson wrote:
> > At the moment the Galeon and Nautilus toolbars have a rightclick popup
> > menu on the back, up, and forward buttons. While this is very useful,
> > it's not very obvious that it's there. Also it has a lot of
> > implementation problems, like bonoboui not really supporting rightclick
> > stuff on toolbar buttons and stuff like that.
> > IMHO Gnumeric and AbiWord solved this much better by having an arrow
> > butotn next to their undo/redo buttons which drops down a list of
> > possible actions. See http://nl.linux.org/~jorn/Files/dropdown.png.
> > That way it's clear it's there, and there are no implementation
> > problems.
> > 
> > Personally I would love to see that in both Nautilus and Galeon. I'm
> > writing the Galeon toolbar code, but I could also make a patch for
> > Nautilus if people are interested ...
> 
> Yeah. I'd love this. We're in a UI freeze, but perhaps we can get this one 
> thing past the release team. Hopefully it fixes the stupid 
> theme-background fuckup on the forward and back buttons too.

	Guys, it's _Really_ unclear to me how the vague proposal above "having
an arrow button next to their undo/redo buttons ..." actually maps to
any concrete proposal whatsoever.

	It seems to me Alex got gotcha'd by some stray UI innovator.

	On the concrete side of doing it; to do it I propose adding an extra
menu type [ since it does seem that this type is rather useful ],

	<toolitem verb="Back" _label="Go Back"/>
		<context button="3">
			<menuitem  verb="RemoveButton"
			 _label="RemoveButton" .../>
			...
		</context>
		<popdown id="GoToLocation">
			<menuitem name="foo" value="file:///"
			 _label="/" .../>
			<menuitem name="baa" value="smb:///"
			 _label="baa" .../>
			...
		</popdown>
	</toolitem>

	And then we snarf the gnumeric code straight into libbonoboui and have
done with it.

	Would that satisfy the requirements ?

> I personally think text on toolbars is crack. Especially on only some of 
> the items. If the user enables crack perhaps we should give it to him 
> though.

	The evolution team use it quite a lot, and priority text seems to make
a chunk of sense in evolution [ and a good few MS apps, where the
purpose of a button is not instantly apparent ].

	Regards,

		Michael.

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot