Re: [Usability] Control Center Appearance Capplet

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Fri, 2007-04-20 at 16:15 +1200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> 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.

I'd want to see some data on how often people accidentally resize
windows before making any final judgement on that (and then how many of
those don't know how to recover).

I dunno, maybe if we really want the maximize button to always mean
"full screen", then we still keep it out of dialog and preference window
title bars, but still allow them to be resized by dragging the edges
(maybe indicated by showing the grippy thing in the bottom corner?)...
that's probably the first thing I'd try in the existing theme capplet
anyway.  I don't consciously look to see if windows have a maximize
button before trying to resize them, would be interesting to find out if
others do.

> 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.

*shrug* Can't say I've ever had much of a problem with it, always seems
to do more or less what I expect.  And if you don't like what it does,
you can always change it (at least for the lifetime of the window);
ultimately all it does it toggle between two sizes and positions of your
choice.

> 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.

I'm not sure how that would help screenreader users; they would still
have to infer the implicit-apply-ness behaviour by the absence of
certain buttons in the dialog, rather than the presence of a button that
positively told them.  (Although that's partly, perhaps, because our
screenreaders don't really do anything to describe the type of each
window to the user... maybe we need an 'instant apply' WM hint that they
can vocalise somehow?)

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

Well, at least that's already being worked on, I believe...

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