Re: [Usability] Gparted: a usable program

[David Christian Berg <david sipsolutions net>]

Hey Kyle!

I installed the newest version of Gparted, that can be found in Debian.
It's incredibly hard to test, because you don't know, what happens, once
you did a change. I think the interface needs an "Apply Changes" and a
"Discard Changes" button, that are greyed out, to tell the user, that
the changes made won't be instant apply.
These buttons should at the bottom of a "Changes Pending" list on the
right.
Furthermore the program should always be executed as root and hence ask
for the root password on start up.
As for the interface: I do agree with Alan's remarks, but am going a lot
further. There are many things, I'd instantly change.
First of all: The colours for used and unused. They are way to close to
one another. I can hardly tell them apart on my laptop. There is further
more no use to explain those, because they are self explaining in the
first place.
My suggestion is to use light shades of the colours indicating the
filesystem as background and using the colour of the filesystem for the
used space. That way one can get rid of the frames and still has all of
the information needed. Also decrease the height of the bar. it takes up
a whole lot of space, without any need.
Furthermore you should get rid of the legend in the etched out frame and
instead align it on top of the disk partitions bar on the right. No
frame around the whole thing, but Shadow 'in' for the separate colours.

These two changes will save a lot of space. You can then take the hard
drive selection button and move it to the top left of the disk
partitions bar. This way the user immediately sees the connection.

Besides these changes you should be using stock icons instead of packing
the standard gnome icons yourself. The columns of the list should
further more be re-sizable.

There is an umount menu entry, but where is the mount, if I accidentally
unmounted a partition?

Well this should be enough for now :)

See you!

David