A couple of HIG questions regarding KDE Telepathy

[Martin Klapetek]

On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 02:14, David Edmundson <david at davidedmundson.co.uk>wrote:

> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 11:05 PM, David Edmundson
> <david at davidedmundson.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > On 3 May 2011 22:27, "Rohan Garg" <rohan16garg at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> Hi
> >> I've been working on improving the usability of KDE Telepathy a bit
> >> and recently made a couple of changes as to how one can set the IM
> >> Status.I'm attaching a image of my work, the image on the left
> >> represents the older GUI whereas the the one on the right shows the
> >> newer GUI [ yes, my GIMP skills are bad ;) ]
> >>
>
> That's looking good.
>
> >> Now, the main issue i am facing is that after i remove the radio
> >> buttons ( which in my opinion make the UI look cluttered ), how do i
> >> represent to the user that his current IM Status is, say Online?
>
> >> We
> >> discussed a couple of scenarios on IRC, like making the current status
> >> as Bold/Italics, or using a tick mark next to the current status,
> >> using a different highlight color etc but none of the ideas were
> >> satisfactory and had one issue or the other.
> >>
>
> What was wrong with each of those solutions? (especially the tick
> mark). Otherwise we'll just end up discussing the same ideas on the ML
> that you've already gone through on IRC. Also we might be able to come
> up with a fix for whatever problems you envisioned.
>

Good point. The requirement is that once you open the presence menu, you
need to immediately see which presence is currently selected. This is now
met with the radios in place. The other options we discussed was these:

- colored menu item - this might easily become wrong with different color
themes etc. And besides, colored item usualy indicates mouse hover or
general focus. So this might get rather confusing.

- bold/italics/underline font - this is again very dependant on user's font
config. If the user has a font, which looks very similar in bold and
regular, then it is a problem. Counter-argument is, that it is a user's
problem. But, we're the ones doing things different here (than the rest of
KApps), so it is as well our problem. Underline/Italics are not that good
either (for obvious reasons? :)

- tick symbol - if this is supposed to be on the left, then it is no better
than the radios. Solution would be to put this on the right, ie. create a
column there. This might work, the only problem I see with this is that we
need to be careful with i18n'd presence strings, as they can get rather long
and we currently use fixed width for the menu because of text-eliding. Which
actually brings me to thinking, that it's wrong and we should rather let it
paint and then only use the current width for the text-eliding. Rohan, try
to change it like that and test it. This would make the right-column-tick
possible.

- toggle buttons - might work, but their projected use is not really the
menus.

Other than that I can't remember anything else we discussed.

 --Marty


> >> Any ideas on how to do this would be highly appreciated.
> >>
> >> Regards
> >> Rohan Garg
> >> www.launchpad.net/~rohangarg
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> KDE-Telepathy mailing list
> >> KDE-Telepathy at kde.org
> >> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy
> >>
> >
>
> (also sorry for my last empty email, I was trying to reply on my phone
> and failed. Failed miserably.)
> _______________________________________________
> KDE-Telepathy mailing list
> KDE-Telepathy at kde.org
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-telepathy
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-telepathy/attachments/20110504/796ab776/attachment.htm