Re: [Usability] Re: EggToolbar

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On 23 Jul 2003, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:

<snip>

> > As has been mentioned before a toolbar with as many as 10-15 items is
> > probably already too cluttered for a developers to really know what the
> > prorities are.  Smaller toolbars and customisable toolbars allow users to
> > choose what they really want if the defaults are ninadequate.
> >
> > I would really hate to see a few bad implementations and the limitations
> > of older toolbars to completely kill off priority text (or whatever you
> > want to call it).
>
> Oh I was not proposing at all to kill off priority text completely.
> With current implementation there is a way to put the text beside the
> icon but not a way to show the text only for the more important items.

The developers must choose terse descriptions and they must make
intelligent decisions about what really is important.
It sucks but this will have to be manually specified by someone at some
stage in the process for each applications.
You really cannot automatically decide what is important.

> That way on a not too big screen I guess items would start to overflow
> at 5-6. That's why I was saying most toolbars would go out of screen.

Automtically truncating long strings might be worth considering.

As far as I know Egg Toolbar already has a mechanism to allow you to see
menu item that there is ont enough room for.
This is not so much a toolkit problme as it is a problme of getting
developers to choose good short labels and to figure out what the most
important high priority buttons are for their application.

The HIG will probalby need to tell developers that button labels should be
only a word or two (not a copy of the Tooltip!) and that it should be
limited to 10* items or less.
(* 10 buttons might fit, things like drop down menus for fonts or zoom
take up more space.  It is only a rough suggestion but if you have both
text and icons the vertical space used including padding comes to about 60
pixels, for aesthetics the buttons will have to be at least as wide as
they are tall, 10x60==600 and you have a few pixels to spare on even a
very small screen.  I clearly spent way too much time thinking abou this
for abiword, which has a hidden pref to enable text lables on the
toolbars).

The responsibility lies firmly with the developer, guidelines are the best
we can do I think.

- Alan H.