Re: [Usability] Control Center Appearance Capplet

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Apr 17, 2007, at 3:31 AM, Calum Benson wrote:
> ...
> 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,

In a window like this one, so little of it would benefit from resizing 
(only two tabs out of five) that the overall pain of accidental 
resizing might well be greater than the overall benefit from 
resizability.
<http://urlx.org/google.com/a6298>
<http://urlx.org/google.com/203e6>

> 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.

Really? I think the zoom button is one of the worst parts of OS X. :-) 
Its behavior is (inevitably) so inconsistent between windows, that it's 
impossible to tell what it's going to do unless you've memorized its 
behavior for that particular class of window.

When a window does have an optimum size, I think that would be better 
invoked by double-clicking on the resizing grippy.
<http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415243>
Then if you think it might be implemented for the current window class, 
and you try double-clicking on the resizing grippy and nothing happens, 
no worries, you're still in exactly the right place to start resizing 
the window manually.

> Well, the main reason the HIG specifies an explicit Close button is
> accessibility-- at the time, the a11y team asked a number of blind 
> users whether or not they felt it was necessary, and they felt that it 
> was. (I don't have any more details than that to hand, I'm afraid.)

As I said in the bug report, that would be better handled by a theme 
with large title-bar close buttons, than by penalizing *everyone* with 
the confusion of multiple close buttons.

> ...
> As you say, that doesn't jive with the OSX model... although I think 
> our a11y folks still consider OSX to be playing catch-up with both 
> Windows and GNOME in terms of accessibility, and I don't know if this 
> is one of the issues they have with it.
> ...

I think Gnome could trounce OS X accessibility-wise, but not with our 
current shambles of a configuration GUI ... But that's another story.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/