Kirk Bridger wrote:
Thomas Wood wrote:Could anyone give me some advice on bug 149323 (HIG issues with Theme Preferences). The issue is that the theme manager often takes longer than one second to apply a theme, so therefore it should not be instant apply. Would it be acceptable to most people to change the theme manager to explicit apply?-Thomas [1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149323 _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list Usability gnome org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usabilityIs the 1 second thing a technological limitation? I guess on less powerful systems this just might not realistic.Perhaps it would be best to have instant apply with user feedback? WindowsXP does that fade to gray fade back thing. That process can be scaled to last long enough to match the computer's speed. But I wonder if that would be a good idea with instant apply. Then an accidental click could be very frustrating. There might be a better way to provide user feedback asking them to wait than the fade effect, or a busy cursor, but I can't think of any right now.
The problem is, all the theme manager does is set a few gconf keys. It has no way of knowing when the settings have been applied, or even if they succeeded. I doubt that there is much we can do to speed up the process either.
The theme previews aren't really big enough to decide if you like it or not, so clicking through them is needed to make the decision - to 'try' them out would be best. I think if the user is provided with an "Applying Theme" type of feedback, implicit would still be best.
One of the other bugs I am looking to fix deals specifically with the fact that the previews aren't good enough. However, the theme manager's current interaction model wouldn't cope with a larger/more detailed preview image. The only way around this would be to have a preview area with a separate drop down list of themes. This would mean that explicit apply would have to be used anyway.
There are a number of bugs open with suggestions on how to improve the UI. I also want to implement a colour schemeing interface now that we will have the ability in GTK+ 2.10. However, I can't see any easy way to do this without using explicit apply. Does anyone have any suggestions?
-Thomas