Gnome Article on UI Design on /.

[cpdrummond at freeuk.com]

On Monday 22 April 2002 7:47 pm, Waldo Bastian wrote:
> On Monday 22 April 2002 05:41 am, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > why do you think it is hard to side with a "single idea"? probably
> > because different people work in vastly diferent
> > ways/methods/environments. so you end up with a large chunk of people who
> > need/want it something one way, and a large chunk who want it another.
> > you can either have a niche product, cripple the interface for many
> > users, or be configurable.
>
> I think the problem is that many features are being added without taking
> the big picture into account, without thinking of the feature in terms of
> "task".
>
> I am currently looking into kcmfontinst and one the things that puzzles me
> is that you can choose whether to delete a font or to move it to /tmp. This
> is a typical example of a bad feature. I don't want to move a font to /tmp.
> I can hardly imagine anyone else would. Maybe people want to temporary
> disable a font (why?) and you could implement that by moving the font to

The "Move to" feature has *nothing* to do with disabling a font. I'll agree 
that maybe just "delete" should happen for the uninstall, but I though it may 
be less error prone to allow somebody to just copy the fonts elsewhere.

In the "Advanced" mode there's the option of removing a whole directory from 
X/Xft's font path - allowing all the fonts contained within to be 
enabled/disabled. With Xft this would be the only way (apart from moving the 
font) to enable/disable a font.

> /tmp, but the feature to move the font to /tmp is pretty silly. If I want
> to move files around I use konqueror.

I'm aware of the bad design of the settings tab - and intend (in a week or so) 
to completely re-write this, and try to have all settings on 1 tab (with 
possibly StarOffice in it's own tab.) I intend to remove some options as well 
- such as the "Fix TTF PS names" option (and have this always enabled), etc.

Craig.