Toolbar Config [Was: sane defaults]

[David Faure]

On Wednesday 19 January 2005 15:47, Benjamin Meyer wrote:
> On Wednesday 19 January 2005 9:30 am, Benjamin Meyer wrote:
> > On Wednesday 19 January 2005 8:46 am, Jakob Petsovits wrote:
> > > On Wednesday, 19 January 2005 11:19, David Faure wrote:
> > > > But I don't understand Jakob Petsovits' answer to that. This is about
> > > > per-user settings, just like toolbar editing.
> > >
> > > I wanted to question the advantage of being able to edit toolbar button
> > > texts. If this is possible, distributors and users will all go and change
> > > their button texts. That makes it even more difficult for telephonic user
> > > support or to get something done on someone other's KDE, because you
> > > can't rely on the same button having the same text.
> > >
> > > I think it should be up to the developers / UI designers to name their
> > > actions understandable and short (so that they fit in the toolbar). If
> > > that is done, there's no reason to let the user change the text just for
> > > the fun of it, because it also brings the disadvantage mentioned above.
> > > Customizing is a good thing, but only if it enhances the user experience.
> > > Text editing doesn't bring any gains here, I think.
> >
> > And to be honest the only reason I wanted to edit the text was to on the
> > fly fix the long messages which really should be fixed in the code anyway. 
> > We don't need two text's.  Most of the time it is just a bad choice and is
> > easily fixed.
> >
> > -Benjamin Meyer
> 
> Actually a good example is in Help/[App Name] HandBook.  Is [App Name] really 
> necessary?  Will it ever not be the name of the application?  Shouldn't it 
> just be "HandBook"?

Well that way it's clear that it's the application handbook - and not the solution
to any KDE-related (or even non-kde-related) problem the user might have...

And a counter example is "Save Message As" (kmail). The three-word description is
good to have in the menus, to make clear what the menu item is really about. But 
in a toolbar there isn't room for 3-words or more, so being able to 
setShortText(i18n("Save")) would be a better solution than truncating the menu 
item IMHO.

-- 
David Faure, faure at kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).