Re: [Usability] Yelp Bookmarks Dialog

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

Hi Shaun,

Sorry for delay in replying, bit behind on my GNOME email these days :/

On 4 Feb 2011, at 21:07, Shaun McCance wrote:

> Having the toolbar with only Remove seems odd. You can open
> a bookmark (double-click or press Enter), but I don't know
> if that should be in the toolbar.

The nearest equivalent I can think of is the bookmarks dialog in the OS X Preview app, which is pretty similar in that you can only bookmark the page you're looking at, and all you can do in the bookmarks editor is delete arbitrary bookmarks.

It basically gets around the "looking a bit silly" issue by using a full-fledged Remove button, rather than the little "-" button that (like the HIG pattern) other OS X apps might use in other situations:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1802478/gnome/Bookmarks.PNG>

I don't see any reason you couldn't do that too -- IMHO, that HIG pattern, although it doesn't explicitly say so at the moment, is best used for lists within a dialog, rather than situations where the list *is* the whole dialog. (I'll update it to say so.)

As you can see, Preview also uses up some of the space down there by (rather needlessly, IMHO) repeating the file/pathname of the selected bookmark -- maybe you could show the corresponding document title or something in that area?

> Should there be a Close button? The grippy that GTK+ adds
> automatically overlaps the toolbar in a not very pleasant
> way right now.

I'd certainly be inclined to add one for the time being, at least until we decide what the future of Close buttons is in GNOME 3. (I suspect we'll decide that a lot of them should go away, but we haven't had that discussion yet.)

> 
> And thinking outside the pattern, should there even be a
> bookmarks editor dialog at all? Or should Yelp just allow
> you to remove a bookmark to the page you're looking at?

I would say the editor is useful... would be rather annoying to have to open a document just to remove its bookmarks, just as it would be annoying in a web browser to have to visit a particular website before you could remove any bookmark you'd set up for it.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd.
mailto:calum benson oracle com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.