hig work

[Thomas Zander]

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On Thursday 28 July 2005 12:18, Ellen Reitmayr wrote:
> Hi,
>
> sorry, I think you've already talked this over, but I couldn't find the
> thread and got to comment on this:
>
> **
> Standard Controls
>
> Radio Buttons

For clarity;  radio buttons can be implemented using QRadiaButtons which 
creates the normal circle with text you see in many configure dialogs.
You can also use QToolButton with toggle=true for things like toolbars. 
This email seems to focus on the latter.

Implementation wise the toolbars radiobuttongs are created by adding 
KToggleAction objects in the application and using the named actions in 
the xml-based RC file.
A KToggleAction  has a method called setExclusiveGroup you call like:
myAction->setExclusiveGroup("mouse")
which makes sure that all radioButtons using that named group will be 
exclusive (only one selected at a time).

Type:  "kde:KToggleAction"  in your konqueror for more info.


> Radio buttons are useful for quickly changing and controling modes in
> an interface.
>
> Guidelines
>  Use radio buttons to control modes
>  Limit the number of options to two or three; use a drop-down menu for
> many options
>  Radio buttons should be used sparingly
> **

Sounds good.
Additionally;
radio buttons should always be directly next to each other and be visually 
separated from other buttons that don't belong to the button group using 
a separator.

> I agree that it is hard to visually mark that exclusive toggle push
> buttons are actually exclusive. But I currently can't see how to
> integrate radio buttons with the toolbar.

What exactly don't you see?  The radiobuttons like we have in KPDF's 
toolbar are a good example where the mouse and the zoom or select tool 
are 3 different modes.
But I can imagine you mean something else here...

> Firstly, all of KDE's toolbars are icon-based instead of text-based

This is not exactly true; all KDEs toolbars are able to show both text and 
icons or even only text.
We just chose icons-only to be the default.
Right click on any toolbar and go to the submenu 'text position' to show 
text on the buttons.

Since the toolbar buttons are using the icons and text from the KAction 
the same text and icon used in the toolbar are shown in the menu which 
guarantees that good (and translated) texts will be present.


> Secondly, toolbars are arranged horizontally, while radio buttons are
> most effective when being used vertically. How can you make sure
> vertical radio button options (imagine long labels) will be arranged
> next to each other, that there will not be a line break?

The rest of this email seems to be assuming old-fashioned (no QToolButton 
based) radio buttons are the only option so I'll ignore this since there 
is a better solution; as I mentioned at the start of this email.

- -- 
Thomas Zander
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