Re: [Usability] "About" menu items galore...

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 13 Jul 2005, Steven Garrity wrote:

> Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:22:06 -0300
> From: Steven Garrity <stevelist silverorange com>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] "About" menu items galore...
>
> I was looking at the right-click context menu of the Gnome panel Trash
> Applet and I wondered about the "About" menu items on all panel applet
> context menus.

So was I coincidentally.  I thought it was odd that the Screenshot
utitlity didn't have an About menu item.  I wondered if it might be better
if none of the had about dialogs.

Then I thought it isn't something we could even enforce.

The GtkAbout dialog does provide useful version and contact information
even if you do not have the documentation installed, not that most users
will ever need it.

> I'm not sure I have an alternative suggestion for where to put the
> version and license/credit info,

Command line arguements I suppose, and in the documentation.
This is something applications should be doing anyway.

> but I wondered if these menu items could even be dropped.

It might be interesting to see if you could hack a custom version of GTK
so that you never ever saw the About menu items and never had any About
dialogs.

> I'm not sure myself - but I thought it was a question worth asking in
> the open.

I've thought about getting rid of About dialogs before because most are
badly used and fail to tell you about the program.  As a beginner tried
using About dialogs and what I most wanted to know was something like
"This is a Word Procesor", "This is an Image Viewer". Thankfully the
GtkAbout dialog does as much as it possible can to get developers to
provide a sane About dialog with useful information that users can easily
cut and paste out of there if they need to.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/