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

[matt at matt.rogers.name]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 10:39:47AM -0400, Ian Reinhart Geiser wrote:
> 
> 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.

ahh, no wonder it didn't look bad. ;)

>     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.
> 

agreed, the automatically scaling icons seems like a nice approach, and would 
probably eliminate the "it wastes screen real-estate" issue i have currently.

> 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.
> 

i'm not saying i'm against text under toolbar, but our toolbars would have 
to undergo a massive cleaning before it'd be as clean as this. ;)


Matt