Re: [Usability] preferences windows, window preferences, shaded windows, nonresizable windows

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Mon, 2007-05-21 at 08:34 -0400, Jacob Beauregard wrote:

> It would make sense, and be extremely useful for there to always be 
> reset/apply/cancel in any preferences window. It would help users in the 
> situation of accidentally changing something when they didn't know what it 
> was beforehand. Load defaults would be a nice feature as well. Keep in mind, 
> with community support, people often refer to the environment as though it 
> were using defaults, so just being able to load them in the preferences to 
> see what someone else is referring to would be useful.

This is a long-standing bug, we just need to agree what the solution is,
which we've never quite managed before.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=95110

> I'd also like to mention window preferences. Right now, as far as I know, 
> there is no way to modify what any given mouse button does. This would be 
> quite useful for a number of reasons.

Provided GNOME can detect that your mouse has N buttons, I agree this
might be useful.  However, I'm not sure I'd like to see a GUI that
assumes an arbitrary amount of buttons, when the vast majority of users
have <= 3.

> Another thing I'd like to mention for window preferences, are titlebar 
> preferences. I use KDE on my laptop and this is probably the biggest reason, 
> the ability to modify the title bar is very important to me when I'm using a 
> touchpad.

I don't really understand what you mean by "modify the titlebar" here,
but it sounds like a function of the window manager.. can't you just use
the KDE window manager in GNOME?

> Since I just mentioned shaded windows, I'll get onto that next. 
> Expected behavior: the ability to horizontally resize
> Actual behavior: none 

Do you expect resizing a shaded window to resize the window, or just its
shaded representation?  Either way, it would have to be obvious that's
what was going to happen, which might be tricky.  Sounds like a
reasonable feature request for bugzilla, though.

> This nothing behavior exists in other window managers as well, but would be 
> useful as it could help aid consistent grouping strategies. In this regard, I 
> also find "magnetic" windows preferable to GNOME's somewhat sticky windows. I 
> am also failing to find any configuration for the somewhat sticky windows.

Hmm, well, the bug about this feature was open for three years while it
was implemented, but I'm sure the metacity developers would still
welcome your feedback.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=81704

> It's also quite unexpected that roll-up/shade action isn't presented in the 
> titlebar context menu when, in the titlebar double-click preferences, it is 
> an oddball presented alongside two actions that are. This is a consistency 
> issue.

I believe metacity can now support a Shade button on the title bar,
which if implemented by theme (if I read the bug report correctly) means
the action will also appear on the menu.  I don't know of such a theme
to try this out, though.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96229


> The last thing I'd like to touch on is nonresizable windows. This may be 
> considered an accessibility issue (I've already sent this one off to 
> accessibility), but some possible solutions could affect usability, and there 
> really needs to be a guideline for when nonresizable windows are used. 

There is, it just needs to be finalised so that it makes it into the
next stable version of the HIG:

http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/design-window.html#layout-window-size

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