widget style cleanup

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Tuesday 14 September 2004 02:33, Adriaan de Groot wrote:
> On Tuesday 14 September 2004 02:41, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Monday 13 September 2004 12:46, Stephan Binner wrote:
> > > (like KSirc->Konversation,
> >
> > oh please no. KSirc may not be a panacea, but replacing it with the
> > usability abomination that is Konversation would be just replacing one
>
> Aaron, this is the kind of stereotypical usability "heh, heh, that app
> sucks donkey nads,heh,heh" comment that really gets my goat. I'd expect
> better of you.

sorry. i've discussed it with others elsewhere and didn't have the time nor 
the desire at the time to polute this thread with it. some basic issues i can 
pull off the top of my head:

 the initial dialog is a configuration dialog
  this dialog doubles as a connection dialog
  this dialog pops up even if autoconnect occurs
 the toolbar has two giant items in it (why doesn't it follow the desktop 
settings for toolbars again?)
  one of the buttons is Configure, which shouldn't be in a toolbar
  the other button is "insert irc colour": this is on the toolbar because?
 there are tons of rather cryptic buttons all over the place
  cryptic because many have single letter labels
  most of these buttons are completely not useful in many (most) situations as 
they require op status
 a Windows menu, which should be Tools or Window.
 it uses an OSD that is, at least in its default configuration, hard to read
  if you have a panel at the top of the screen it's doubly broken =(
  why doesn't it use the standard passive popups?

basically, i see ksirc as a reasonably competent irc app. i see konversation 
as similarly competent. both have issues, and as you can see from the above 
list konversation suffers from a number of interface issues. i just don't see 
any compelling reason to replace one app that our users are fairly used to 
with another app that is no better and in may ways worse.

the issues in konversation are totally fixable. when/if they are and if there 
is a compelling reason to use konversation over ksirc (e.g. maintenance, 
dependencies, efficiency, capability), i'd be totally cool with the 
replacement of ksirc happening. but it's not there yet, is it?

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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