toolbar icons

[David Nolden]

Am Donnerstag 06 August 2009 13:07:18 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> 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.
In my experience, the toolbar is mainly useful to quickly do some very common 
action _again_ without having to remember keyboard shortcuts. Every toolbar 
action is also replicated in the menu, and should have the same icon there.

So you can also learn the icon using the menu, and then use the toolbar to get 
quick access to that action.

With added text, the toolbar icons get another use: Increasing 
discoverability. But the better solution would be emphasizing such important 
actions in the main menu, so they can be easily discovered there, and then the 
toolbar without icon descriptions can be used to allow quick access to those 
actions again.
> 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.
I would not miss any of the current icons, and I do think that the toolbar 
kind-of sucks, but I'm quite sure there is some actions that would make a lot 
of sense in the toolbar, to allow quick access.

For example "Build", "Run", "Debug" would be typical such useful actions.

Greetings, David