Re: [Usability] Gparted: a usable program

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 5 Feb 2006, David Christian Berg wrote:

> Date: Sun, 05 Feb 2006 11:45:19 +0100
> From: David Christian Berg <david sipsolutions net>
> To: kyle kbrooks ath cx
> Cc: Usability <usability gnome org>
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Gparted: a usable program
>
> Hey Kyle!

Are you a Gparted developer, a developer looking to contribute patches or
just an enthusiastic user trying to help?  (I'm always happy to make
suggestions but sometimes it is counter productive if no one is interested
in implementing them [1]).

> 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.

Been a long time since I used Partition Magic but the ability to review
all the changes before committing to them sounds familiar, and a very wise
precaution with something as potentially destructive as Partitioning.

> As for the interface: I do agree with Alan's remarks, but am going a lot
> further.

(I would too if I had the time and resources.  I dont suppose GParted can
recover messed up FAT partitions becuase that would be a very good reason
for me to take a closer look at it right now.)

> 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.

For best accessibility generally designers must use a combination of both
colour and shape or texture to help avoid ambiguity.  Colour alone is not
enough.

> 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.

I'm always trying to educate people on how to use Stock items correctly.
Ideally a program should also inherit the stock label if at all possible,
as this means you get the benfit of a lot of translation work already done
in GTK.  (Someday I'd hope it would be possible to make a nice simple Text
Editor entirely from stock components, and no additional translation
necessary.)

> There is an umount menu entry, but where is the mount, if I accidentally
> unmounted a partition?
>
> Well this should be enough for now :)

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/

[1] I suggested GdkPixbuf should support PSD as it would make Gnome much
mroe interesting for multimedia users if their file format of choice could
be previewed everywhere, but without a developer actively interested in
implementing the idea it was rejected (not that there was anything
actually wrong with the idea).  Maybe some day I'll try doing it myself
but I think it would be a very big task, even though the code to support
PSD exists already in both the GIMP and ImageMagick.