Re: [Usability] Alacarte UI

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Calum Benson wrote:

> Date: Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:00:08 +0100
> From: Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>
> To: Travis Watkins <alleykat gmail com>
> Cc: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Alacarte UI
>
>
> On 25 Apr 2006, at 22:24, Travis Watkins wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > The current alacarte UI [1] mixes application and dialog interfaces.

> > I'd like to make it a dialog but that seems to make adding features
> > like undo/redo and cut/copy/paste impossible.

As Joachim mentioned user will usually expect Undo, Copy, Cut, paste to
work so you could put them in without necessarily providing buttons for
all of them.  The discoverability is not as good but we allow cut and
paste into a text entry without always providing buttons to let users know
it is there.  Argueably you could have your list without providing up/down
buttons and have users rely on drag and drop or whatever the standard
keybindings are for moving list items (if there are any?), rather than
having all that dead space on the side because of those buttons.

> > There is just no where to put the buttons for all that. To make it an
> > application I'd have to drop the bottom row of buttons and add a
> > toolbar.
>
> I'm not sure that you'd /need/ to add a toolbar... it's not a
> prerequisite for an application to have a toolbar.  It would probably
> be fine just to drop the three dialog buttons, and make sure all the
> functions were available on the menus.

Revert isn't (or wasn't) in the menus, I meant to try provide a patch
rather than filing yet another bug report but I hadn't gotten around to it
yet.

Although I doubt anyone would be doing so
much menu editing that they would really need keybindings for faster
access I was also thinking about providing keybindings like Ctrl+N for new
items and Ctrl+Shift+N for new folder/submenu and maybe a keybinding for
instert seperator (if I recall correctly this would be consistent with the
bookmarks manager in Mozilla/Konqueror and the Kde menu editor).

Sincerely

Alan Horkan