Re: [Usability] Control Center Appearance Capplet



On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 16:23 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote:

> Either that, or including the remaining options in the theme. For those 
> on the "Options" tab it might make sense as some themes might want to 
> specify if icons are shown in buttons for example. However, it obviously 
> doesn't make much sense to add font hinting settings to the theme. How 
> could we separate these in an obvious way though?

Well, one argument might be that font rendering preferences really
belong in a separate, OSX-like Displays capplet, where one defines
screen resolution, multi-head layout (I wish!) and colour profiles (I
wish!).  After all, if your desktop spans both a CRT and LCD display (as
my laptop's often does), you'd ideally want a different rendering
setting on each display anyway :)

> > I don't think it's too hard to argue that metacity's "no maximise on
> > dialogs" theory is somewhat flawed.  Any window that benefits from
> > resizing should be maximisable IMHO, although some windows may require
> > constraints other than "the full size of the screen".  E.g. in this
> > particular case, you probably just want to maximise the window
> > vertically (something for which we even have a keyboard shortcut,
> > ironically), but not change the width at all.  OSX has the upper hand on
> > us here with its zoom button, I guess.

> I'm not sure. After all, what's the difference between a Dialog window 
> and a Normal window? Presumably Dialog windows are asking for some kind 
> of user input or action, hence their name. Any other window should be a 
> Normal window. I don't see that Preference windows are really creating 
> any sort of dialogue with the user.

Well, I don't really think the distinction is important to the
maximisation question-- if the window is made more useful by being
resizable in one or both dimensions, we're failing by not allowing the
user to do it. We have other visual cues available to us to make the
distinction between different types of window, although the fewer types
the better anyway as far as I'm concerned.  (Most users regard them all
as 'just windows' anyway, although a taxonomy is certainly useful to us
as designers.)

> I'm not quite sure about this, as Metacity allows you to use key 
> combinations to close the current window anyway. Perhaps someone can 
> comment on whether this is still relevant.

Well, IIRC, the sort of concerns raised at the time were:

- Without the Close button, a blind user has to infer that the dialog is
instant apply by the absence of any action buttons.  The presence of the
Close button gives them a more positive indication.

- For people with limited mobility in their hands, a key combination
isn't necessarily as easy to input as hitting Tab a few times, then
Space.  (Sticky keys can help out here of course, but the user may or
may not be using that.)

I can get in touch with the accessibility folks again and see what they
think, though.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems





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