Re: [Usability] Toolbar flexibility ideas

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2006, Ronan Jouchet wrote:

> Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:11:14 +0200
> From: Ronan Jouchet <r jouchet free fr>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: [Usability] Toolbar flexibility ideas
>
> Hi, I've 3 UI questions about possible flexibility improvements in
> GNOME/GTK UIs :
>
> - One of the things that I miss from some (Windows) apps is good toolbar
> customizability. Firefox/TBird also do a great job there with their
> customizable panels.

> I thought that sort of feature wasn't planned in GNOME apps, but then I
> found one magic Evince dialog : Edit>Toolbar. Wow ! Ala-Firefox
> draggable items, separators, smooth animation, great !

Abiword has customisable toolbars too, just so you know.

> Hence : Is expanding this type of feature to all GNOME apps planned ?

There are not any specific plans I am aware of which is not to say that
there is anything stopping a developer coming along tomorrow and providing
patches to add such functionality to Gtk.

> - In the same domain, why the "Detachable Toolbar" tickbox in
> System>Preferences>Menus&Toolbars is only effective on a few apps ?
> (e.g. Evolution yes, gedit no, Nautilus no)

Many applications fail to implement this feature.
When gedit moved from an older type of Toolbar they dropped the feature
without thinking about it.

Some such as Evince politely declined to implement it when asked pointing
out that it is not a particularly useful feature especially since Evince
only has the one toolbar there isn't much potential to rearrange things.

I filed various requests for more applications to implement this
consistently but the feature is not useful enough and also it is probably
a feature which should be built into the toolbar so that developers do not
need to deliberately add it themselves.

Finally some users have problems reattaching toolbars when they come
loose, and it would be my personal recommendation that features such as
rearranging and detaching toolbars should be disabled by default.  users
should be able to choose to unlock the toolbars and then relock them
after customization.

> - And finally, is it planned to enable dragging a toolbar next to
> another ?

it is sort of planned, maybe.  there have been requests in bugzilla for a
very long time and I expect the gtk developers will eventually add such a
functionality (perhaps as part of larger toolbar docking plans) but you
would need to ask the gtk developers to find out for sure.

> I think it would allow to gain some vertical space and avoid
> not-really-sexy unused horiz. space. This is especially true with non4/3
> wide screens that generate a lot of such unused horizontal space...

it is certainly a feature I would like to have, and some applications are
still clinging on to Bonobo because it offered such functionality.

> I hope this small feedback will help.
> Thanks for everything, and keep up the excellent work ! GNOME rocks.

Thanks for your feedback, hope my comments will be of some use to you.

-- 
Alan