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Thoughts on the Desktop

Mon, 2007-07-16 22:40 — timtownsend

OK, so I've been using Prolint off-and-on for about 3 weeks now, and I have a couple thoughts about the main UI component, the Prolint Desktop window (desktop.w) and how it's usability could be improved.

First of all: the thing is huge! It takes up way more of my screen than I would like. For the first 10 minutes, having the verbiage next to every button was nice, but after that I would rather have the real estate back. Perhaps the window can have 2 layouts, the current one and one for more advanced users that has just the buttons (kind of like Progressive Disclosure.) Or you could just move the text to tooltips and be done with it.

Also the "Lint Active AB" and "Lint Open AB" buttons seem to use the configuration you used in the last "Lint files..." operation, how about a popup menu on these buttons that would let you choose the configuration to use. (A popup menu dynamically built from all the configurations available.)

Any comments?

-Tim Townsend


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Thu, 2007-07-19 21:14 — jurjen
jurjen's picture

re: thoughts on the desktop

Hi Tim,

I agree the desktop window is not a beauty, but it was cheap and it works in character mode which was a "nice to have" requirement at that time.
Any layout will do for me, I just like it to be simple to maintain, and easy to use.
Maybe you can make a sketch/screenshot of how you would like it to be?

Hmmm, I just realize that a screenshot can't show more than one tooltip at a time.... which also shows why tooltips are highly overrated for usability, just like other widgets that are hidden until you take some action, like context-menu's.


Thu, 2007-07-19 21:54 — tamhas
tamhas's picture

Versions

I know it is a pain to support multiple versions and/or to have version specific code embedded, but I wonder if there isn't a point in here where some branching or alternates are called for ... not just on this issue, but on some others that have been raised recently for OE10 capabilities. I know there are a lot of ChUI and V9 sites out there and I certainly wouldn't want the tool to stop being usable by them, but isn't it reasonable to think that maybe ChUI and GUI running exactly the same layout isn't likely to be ideal for at least one of them?