Hi, Nathan Carl Summers <rock@xxxxxxxx> writes: > Screen estate is really a non-issue here. Even with the ridiculously > bloated theme that comes with Glade for Windows (yeah, yeah, buy me a T1 > so I can do this kind of stuff at home on my beloved Debian Sarge box > instead of at work) the fully-expanded dialog is by default 344 x 521 > pixels, which means that it will fit on any display bigger than 640 x 480. > Actually, it will even fit on a 640 x 480 display, since the somewhat > ungraceful behavior of the dialog is to clip the bottom part if there > isn't enough space allocated. If your display adaptor can't do 640 x 480, > you will have bigger problems with GIMP than just the new image dialog > going off the screen. I wasn't talking about dialog size here. The point is that the memory size label is probably the least important thing in this dialog while your mockup gives it the most prominent appearance. If the label is really so difficult to understand then it should be removed. I do however think that most users will understand it as it is. Perhaps it should be put in italics so it looks less like the other labels? > When the icon changes to the warning icon, that is distracting, but > it is so on purpose. The same kind of feedback could be achieved by changing the label to bold or adding an exlamation mark. Simple, small and effective. > > Centering the unit menu next to the size entries does IMO look > > horrible since it deviates from the table layout of the dialog. > > However, aesthetics was not the reason I made this change; there is > a much more important usability factor involved here. As the HIG > states, "Visual design is not just about making your application > look pretty. Good visual design is about communication. A > well-designed application will make it easy for the user to > understand the information that is being presented, and show them > clearly how they can interact with that information." The changes I > made make the dialog much more effective at communicating to the > user the mechanics of the dialog. Right, that's why for a group of X/Y controls we put the label at the upper left and the unit menu at the lower right. That's how the user scans the dialog. It's also the reason that the OK button is located at the lower right of the dialog. > The problem here is that the existing layout breaks a cardinal rule > of any kind of layout: the dialog elements are not treated > consistently. The controls in the "Image Size" and "Advanced" > groups are labelled with headings, but the template control has no > heading at all. This lack of balance makes the template dropdown > look like an afterthought. Originally I simply bolded the Template: > label, which made it look more balanced, but the dropdown still > looked out of place, so I indented it. The unit control is a single item, not a group of controls. It thus doesn't deserve a group label. The way it is presented now gives it less weight than the "Image Size" controls. That's good because the Image size is the most important part of the dialog and should be what the user looks at first. > Placing the template as part of the size group won't work because > the template influences more things than just the size. I also > don't think that templates should be place in the Advanced group. It also won't work for technical reasons. The template menu is not part of the GimpTemplateEditor widget. > > I think Jimmac and Tigert did a very good jo with their mockup and > > I don't see much room for improvement. IMHO we should stick to it. > > This sounds very closed minded. The dialog proposed by Jimmac and > Tigert was a big improvement over the old one, but to say there is > hardly any room for improvement smacks of hubris. Even if you > didn't see any room for improvement when you wrote that, it does not > in any way mean that there in reality isn't any, or even that you > won't see any room after more discussion. I don't see much room for improvement. But that doesn't mean that I don't think that it could be further discussed. I didn't put an end to the discussion, I only told you my opinions on your mockup. Would you have preferred if I had simply ignored it? However, I think it would make much more sense to now think about the other dialogs that need to be converted. As soon as we are through with all of them, we will have collected more experience with the new HIG layout and can start the process all over. That will certainly bring us further more quickly. Sticking to an endless discussion of the File-New dialog might bring us the perfect dialog but it will leave the rest of the application looking like shit. Our schedule for 2.2 doesn't leave us much time, we need to get things into a reasonable state soon. Noone says that things can't be changed again later. But I'd rather not do too many changes to the dialogs in this development cycle. Keeping some of the established user interface elements will the switch to 2.2 easier for our users. Sven
