[Usability] [Fwd: New beeps in gtk]

[Jason Brower <encompass gmail com>]

I think it is very required... here is why:
When I do undo's for example.  I may have many steps that I want to undo
that I may not even see in the formating.  Some mistakes are outside the
area of my view.  Now I could wait for a long time a presume they are
done.  But I think having the beep lets me know that it is "complete".
I do see your point of view though.  It's just that some products, you
can't see what your undoing all the time.
As for the other...
My mother depends on the beep and feels better knowing that the computer
is telling her it is the end of the document.  As for KDE they may
aproach it with a popup window stating "You have reached the end of the
document. Would you like to insert a carrage return?" and Show you and
OK or Cancel. (JK KDE team!)
Do you see my point?
Regards,
Jason Brower
-------- Forwarded Message --------
From: Yevgen Muntyan <muntyan tamu edu>
To: usability gnome org
Subject: [Usability] New beeps in gtk
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2007 12:50:31 -0600

Happy New Year everybody,

I would like to ask your opinion on this new GTK feature: more beeps
here and where. There are lot of places where it beeps now, and
probably many of them are good, and I want to ask about two specific
places:

First, it beeps when you press a shortcut for insensitive menu item. For
instance, if Undo is disabled and you press Ctrl-Z, it beeps. In particular,
you can press and hold Ctrl-Z to undo all changes and wait until it starts
beeping (it beeps on every key press, i.e. you hold keys and it's beeping
repeatedly).

Second, it beeps when you press an arrow key or Home/End or
PageUp/PageDown (or those with modifiers) in a text widget (GtkTextView
or GtkEntry) and cursor can't be moved, i.e. if it's already where this
key would move it - first position for Left, first position nit the 
paragraph
for Home and so on. For instance, if cursor is at the beginning of an entry
and you press Left, it beeps. And if you press and hold Left in an entry to
move to start, it starts beeping repeatedly when cursor reaches start 
position.

Is this right from usability point of view? It's said that this beeping 
actually
is usability - you get notified when an action initiated with keyboard 
failed.
But I believe it's counter-usability, computer should not beep if nothing
that requires user attention happened and nothing happened that user
won't know about without beep (e.g. if you press Ctrl-V and paste failed
for some strange reason but not because there is nothing in clipboard).

There is an issue of people with vision troubles, they may really benefit
from additional beeps. I can't talk about that, since I really have no idea
how the toolkit should behave in that case, though I do believe it should
be different from the default mode.

It might be my special personal reaction, but when I hear beep on pressing
Up key, I think "Huh? What happened?! Did I get email in Mozilla or did
my hard drive failed?"

What do you think?
Thanks,
Yevgen

_______________________________________________
Usability mailing list
Usability gnome org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability