[Usability] Re: New "Add to panel" dialog

[Manu Cornet <Manu Cornet GMail com>]

Hi !

First of all, thanks to everyone on the list for your answers and your
encouragements. I basically didn't know what "GTK" was before making
this dialog this summer, and it has been really fun trying to make this
easy to use and good-looking while discussing with other people to
decide what to do with it. A few answers :

* I'm not sure I mentionned this (there seems to have been a little
misunderstanding), but the new dialog does actually support drag and
dropping applets onto the panel (like Diego said, I found it important
to mention it in the top label, since this possibility was not obvious).

* About where to place the selected applet's description : I first
wanted to use tooltips. But it happens that using tooltips on
GnomeCanvasItems is not possible without a lot of tweaking (using
invisible widgets covered by an invisible CanvasItem or stuff like that)
which would be at the same time quite dirty and very unpleasant to
implement. So I guess I'll just wait for the next version of GnomeCanvas
to give me this possibility (or I might just as well contribute myself,
if I can). 

* Are applet descriptions really that important ? The main reason why I
first chose to use mainly icons and applet names while putting the
descriptions aside is that I really don't believe they provide a lot
more information than just the applet's name, most of the time. I think
that displaying the description at the bottom of the window gets them
out of the way, but they are still available if needed. But I agree they
should be more noticeable. I suggest :

     1. Drawing an long white horizontal rectangle onto which the text
        will be displayed, thus highlighting it from the grey background
        (what about this ?)
     2. Centering the text
     3. Drawing a line between the text and the buttons below (maybe not
        necessary because of 1 ? I'm not very familiar with HIG
        guidelines -- what do you mean you already noticed that ? :-p).

* About GNOME preferences, Carlos Garnacho already did the same kind of
thing for the g-c-c. Categories are just not actually written in each
item, but the layout and the code are ready. It still lacks something
like a search bar, though.

* Typeahead : maybe I should just put the focus on the search bar when a
letter is typed outside of it ?

* Hidden keywords : I like the idea, and I would love to implement that.
But I need some input from gnome-applets to see which keywords to use
for each applet and where to store them.

* For categories stuff, the "open card sorting" (which I didn't know of)
looks great.

* I will definitely change the "Cancel" button into "Close". However, I
don't agree that the "Add" button should let the window open : I believe
adding just one applet is what people want to do in 95% of situations,
isn't it ? Moreover, it would break the "type one or two words, press
enter and you're done" thing (which is *really* nice according to
several people, because you don't need to click anywhere).

* Highlighting applets already in the panel to see which is which : I
like the idea, although I'm not sure about how to make it happen. I also
like the multiple selections idea, but can't drag & drop be used
instead ? It has the advantage of letting you choose the position of
each applet.

All right, thanks again for your answers :)

Cheers,
Manu