A couple of HIG questions regarding KDE Telepathy

[Francesco Nwokeka]

2011/5/4 Martin Klapetek <martin.klapetek at gmail.com>

> 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.
>

How about the QToolButton::setDown(bool) method? we could set the status
used by setting the toolbutton to setDown giving it an "engraved" look

Francesco
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