Re: [Usability] Toolbar flexibility ideas

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2006-09-01 at 01:05 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> 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.

There was talk of getting a toolbar editor into GTK+,
but I don't know what came of it.  My guess is it's
waiting on the long-standing request for a high-level
application window widget.

> > - 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.

To be more precise, this was a feature of the toolbars
found in libbonoboui.  GTK+ toolbars never had this
feature, and writing it oneself is non-trivial.  Thus,
as more and more applications move away from bonobo,
fewer and fewer applications have this feature.

Personally, I don't think this is a good candidate for
a desktop-wide toggle.  Individual applications should
decide whether this is useful for their users, and allow
users to toggle the feature in the toolbar editor dialog.
(It's certainly not something I would be inclined to add
to Yelp, for instance.)

--
Shaun