Gnome Article on UI Design on /.

[Thomas Zander]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 02:30:15PM +0200, Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 12:13:05PM +0200, Alexander Kellett wrote:
> > Which reminds me. I'd agree here but for one thing, windows has a 
> > nice gui regedit program. How about adding one to KDE but going one
> > step better? - by adding comments to all the configure options.
> > 
> i'm very much in favor of such thing.
Besides the fact that I am not; it kind of overshoots the target by 200%
since we want to limit the configurability of software, adding a not-so
userfriendly interface to the config options does not limit the developer
in making up configuration options.

> but i'd formalize the comments, so they can be parsed and used for
> automatically generating a frontend. every field would have a type (int,
> float, string, bool, enum, file, url, font, color, etc...). for enums
> the possible values (words) would be listed; for numerical values a
> valid range, etc.  the default would be documented as well.
> you may look at kdm/kfrontend/genkdmconf.c for something remotely
> related.

I have not yet seen a auto-generated userinterface that is understandable
without a lot of documentation. kdcop is a good example of where the mixing
of datatypes with user input does not work.

-- 
Thomas Zander                                            zander at earthling.net
The only thing worse than failure is the fear of trying something new
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