Gnome Article on UI Design on /.

[Alexander Kellett]

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 03:03:37PM +0200, Thomas Zander wrote:
> 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.

I'd really have to disagree here. KDE will not make it if it can not be
applied without a lot of pain to other peoples way of working. If it forces
you to work in a certain way then KDE imo will begin to suck immensely.
I don't really wish to be dumbed down to the lowest denominator.

> 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.

Agreed. It will be difficult to get it right, but in the end it 
will save devels time (GUI options are annoying to have to write) 
and remove confusion in the preferences by allowing much more to
become advanced options.

Earlier on in the thread a "more >>" button was discussed. It would
surely not be too much work to integrate this into a normal preferences
dialog and simply have a ">>" button popup the "regedit" util in the given
"preferences folder".

mvg,
Alex