Re: [Usability] A (rather long) list of GNOME usability issues

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-10-17 at 14:37 +0300, Kalle Vahlman wrote:

> With metacity, using ALT while clicking works, but is of course a
> little inconvenient. 

Yeah. Though Alt conflicts with Gimp's and Inkscape's modifier use,
which sucks.

> In my opinion, unconditional passthru would need
> visual hinting (more than the titlebar) that tells the user "no, you
> can't click this button that is in your plain view yet, you have to
> focus the window first", otherwise there would be lots of furstration
> about buttons that do not work.

I agree. Wouldnt it be possible to for example hack Clearlooks to
support this? We'd need to think about the visual style carefully
though, and the whole behaviour needs to be pondered throughly.

But then we still have all the other toolkits indeed. This is pretty
much the reason that got us pondering about the Tango project* - we are
reaching a point where we need to start worrying about consistency
between different toolkits and software. XUL is just the one example,
for example Skype is Qt, Acroread is Gtk, Openoffice is partly Gtk and
their own toolkit etc.. We need to get together somehow as developers
and designers - how can we make this whole mess of the linux desktop
consistent? It should be clear enough by now that different toolkits are
part of life of a Linux user. If you disagree, you dont count as an
example :)

(* tango-project.org)

>  But such visual hinting has other
> considerations, which in my mind surpass the problem of clicking where
> it doesn't count. UI designs should have enough padding to make it
> possible at all times, right ?-)

That is true too.

> You could introduce a minor timeout for raising, and check if the
> pointer has moved over $TOLERANCE pixels and then decide whether to
> raise the window or not. If release happens within the timeout, then
> you can raise immediately. Maybe also if there's nothing to drag under
> the cursor.

Yeah, checking whether cursor is over a draggable item is a good point.

//Tuomas