[PATCH] "Show only important text" mode for toolbars

[Ian Reinhart Geiser]

Matt Rogers said:
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 10:22:29AM -0400, Ian Reinhart Geiser wrote:
>>
>> Peter Rockai (mornfall) said:
[...]
>>     http://www.geiseri.com/pics/kaudiocreator.png
>>     http://www.geiseri.com/pics/kwrite.png
>>
>
> In general, i dislike the large icons because i see it as a major waste
> of screen real-estate (think 800x600), although these screenies don't
> look completely
> bad.
Actually I lied these are medium icons with text under.  Since we know
screensize it would be trivial to automaticly scale the icons sizes to
sane defaults.
    http://www.geiseri.com/pics/kwrites.png
Shows multiple kwrites with different icons sizes.  Since I run this
laptop in 1024x768 I use the medium icons, but small also looks pretty
clean.  I think it would warrant some exploration of toolbar
simplification (less than 8 most important functions), better icons in
general, and IMHO text.  Text is funny.  Text is usually hidden in a
tooltip, but have you ever watched a user play "lets hover over buttons to
see the correct tooltip so i know what i am getting"?

With open/save/new its less of an issue over time, but with lesser known
actions that are key to an applications function the problem is more
prominent.  IMHO text w/ automaticly scaled icons per screen size (small
for 800x600 (text only adds ~10 pixels)  medium for 1024x785 and large for
bigger screens.  Then devs can just turn this on or off globally if they
want as the final option in the control panels.

IMHO the KWrite pics make kwrite look very clean and easy to understand.
It only took 15 minutes to simplify and tweak the toolbars.  This effort
coupled with a usability study could be a very simple task IMHO.

Cheers
   -ian reinhart geiser
--
--
+-Ian Reinhart Geiser geiseri at sourcextreme.com
+-Vice President of Engineering
+-http://www.sourcextreme.com
+-It's not that we don't make mistakes, we just don't keep them around.