Re: [Usability] GTK+ at the UX Hackfest

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

On Wed, 2010-03-03 at 12:20 +0100, Carlos Garnacho wrote:
> Hi!,
> 
> On mié, 2010-03-03 at 00:03 +0100, Filippo Argiolas wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 11:55 PM, Filippo Argiolas <fargiolas gnome org> wrote:
> > 
> > [cut]
> > 
> > > Well it's not actually the radio functionality that I really care,
> > > that's easily implementable. It's more the custom container that can
> > > be themed to visually merge together several buttons. Once that's
> > > done, the buttons could behave like simple buttons (probably useless),
> > > toggle buttons or radio buttons. They would be just the usual buttons
> > > into a special container probably.
> > 
> > Look at Carlos post about theming hackfest too[1]. Point 3 really
> > seems to be exactly what I'm talking about.
> > 
> > 1. http://blogs.gnome.org/carlosg/2009/02/20/dublin-theming-hackfest/
> 
> The idea there is that current widgets/containers would be able to tell
> theme engines how do painted items visually connect each other. There
> would be no need for special containers or buttons, nor hacks in theme
> engines such as peeping into the parent widget GType.


I'm really not sure this is a good idea; it's really not expressive
enough to just say "this button is somehow related to this one" and let
themes decide what to do with it. Some themes might ignore it, some
themes might do what you expect and some themes may want to do something
completely different.

If two buttons are supposed to be connected because of some interaction
design, then this should be reflected in a widget explicitly designed to
cater for that situation.

Regards,

Thomas