[Usability]A Tale of a Toolbar editor

[iain <iain prettypeople org>]

The story so far.

Epiphany has the starting of a rather nice toolbar editor.
http://beauty.stanford.edu/tbe-seth.png (a screenshot with some comments
from Seth, couldn't find the original image). At the moment it is
completely ally unfriendly, but we know about it, and bill haneman has
made some comments that I think should be possible to add, so thats not
a concern at the moment[1]

I've been working on adding support for changing toolbar styles and have
come up with http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/tbe-iain-5.png taking
into account Seth's comments[2] and the HIG.

The way it works at the moment is that the application author can
specify the default for the toolbar style (from text, icons, both and
both horizontally) which overrides the gnome default. 

My reasons for this are that when there's more than one toolbar (say for
GNumeric or my own application Marlin) there is the possibility that the
application would look like a very very ugly thing indeed.
http://www.prettypeople.org/~iain/fun-with-egg-toolbars.png gives you[3]
an idea of how bad things could look 

DaveB didn't like this idea, and he wanted the gnome preferences be the
default, and then let the user change it to something that looks better.
His argument is also based on some belief that multiple toolbars are
inherently bad and we shouldn't do anything to encourage them. I don't
believe they are bad per say, and that they're not going to go away if
we discourage them, people just aren't going to use things like this
toolbar editor because it makes applications look ugly by default.

So, now we're all up to speed, I thought I'd go to the greater community
and ask for opinions.

These are the options I've come up with, but they are open ended and can
be added to.

a) Toolbar uses applications default settings for toolbar style and
provides an option called "GNOME Default" among the other styles that
sets it to whatever the gnome default is.

b) Toolbar uses GNOME Default setting, and provides the other options to
change it.

As I can see people in the above camps arguing constantly over this I
thought of a compromise
c) The toolbar uses the GNOME default for the main toolbar. If there's
no other toolbars, everything works fine. If there are other toolbars,
it uses the applications setting for these toolbars. The options to
change the toolbar settings then only apply to the main toolbar.

d) Fill in here.

Bear in mind that we are already providing API calls to override the
default GNOME setting, so an author is free to override it if he wants.
I think that coming up with the compromise in c) is most likely to make
consistant looking applications. But then, maybe this is just me as a
sloppy focus/only give focus to windows I tell it to window manager
user...

iain
[1] Just so people don't start complaining that the toolbar editor isn't
a11yified and focussing on that.
[2] To get the dialog buttons to line up correctly I had to apply the
following patch to gtk. What is the correct way to get this behaviour?

diff -u -p -r1.51 gtkdialog.c
--- gtkdialog.c 16 Dec 2002 00:05:20 -0000      1.51
+++ gtkdialog.c 13 Mar 2003 14:45:15 -0000
@@ -212,8 +212,7 @@ update_spacings (GtkDialog *dialog)
                                   content_area_border);
   gtk_box_set_spacing (GTK_BOX (dialog->action_area),
                        button_spacing);
-  gtk_container_set_border_width (GTK_CONTAINER (dialog->action_area),
-                                  action_area_border);
+  gtk_container_set_border_width (GTK_CONTAINER (dialog->action_area), 12);
 }
  
 static void
[3] The extra separators are just a bug in my code that I have since
fixed, but I think everyone will agree that even without the separators
it looks crap.
--