toolbar icons

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 06.08.09 08:56:25, David Nolden wrote:
> Am Mittwoch 05 August 2009 22:17:09 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> > On 05.08.09 21:58:23, David Nolden wrote:
> > > So what do you think?
> >
> > Not an option IMHO, we should be following the KDE setting here and thats
> > text under icons by default. The reason has been given numerous times,
> > icons don't tell you what they do unless you already know them from
> > elsewhere. I've recently taken the test from Nuno about our new icons and I
> > had a really hard time to identify the right icons for the given concept.
> > (yes that might also mean that the icons themselves need improvement, but
> > thats mostly our own fault, nuno has no idea how they should look like so
> > we need to give him good input)
> Most people have learned that there are other ways of finding out what an icon 
> does (Tooltips). You don't need to see what the icon does in text all the 
> time.

That takes a lot more time to memorize icon and action. And especially with
the toolbar the idea is to _quickly_ do something, not waiting another
second until the tooltip comes up and you can read what a button does.
 
> I think icons with text are mainly useful for _casual_ users.

In the long term yes, but in the short term usage (i.e. just starting out
with KDevelop) they'll need it too to memorize the icon with the underlying
action. I don't think thats a one-time thing, you need some time to really
remember this.

> I hate that argument personally, but _every_ other IDE I have ever seen 
> screenshots of uses icon-only. They need the space for more useful stuff, and 
> so do we.

At least one doesn't do that for all their icons (QtCreator). And VS
is not a good example, there's basically never been text-with-icons
toolbars on that platform.

> > I can actually easily fit all three toolbars onto the screen without any
> Even 1680 is a very high resolution, especially for a laptop. Most laptops are 
> sold with 1280x1024 or similar, which is tiny in these measures, but perfectly 
> fine for programming. Also I think adding such large whitespaces into the 
> toolbar clutters the otherwise compact UI.
> > context-browser line is usually working best when having its own line.
> > On 1400 it starts to get crowded, either I make the quickopen line
> > rather small (which isn't a big deal, because it'll expand as needed -
> > btw it seems to expand larger as the mainwindow, that is a problem if my
> > mainwindow is maximized!) or move something into its own line (IIRC
> > thats the default for the new context browser).
> Nothing should be in its own line. All these things fit nicely into one line, 
> as you see on my screenshot. ;-) On my machine, the context browser actions 
> are in the standard line.

Right, _your_ machine. But that cannot be the default setup if you want
people to actually use the toolbar buttons.

Another alternative would be to simply get rid of the toolbars completely
and only provide the quickopen and context browser lineedits.

> > The screenshot above is also misleading, it contains the debug-actions
> > which shouldn't be shown at all in the code area.
> Yes sure, but with kate-actions instead of debugger-actions, it should look 
> the same.

No it doesn't. I'll provide a screenshot tonight. The problem only comes up
with kate+debug actions.

Andreas

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