On Aug 3, 2007, at 2:56 PM, J. Bruce Fields wrote:
On Thu, Aug 02, 2007 at 11:01:01PM -0400, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
Steffen, you seem to be more in-tune with the Mac UI standards
than I am. Any suggestions on what I can do in git-gui to make
this feature more obvious to users?
From time to time I have a look at the Apple Human Interface
Guidelines [1]. They contain large Apple specific sections but also
ideas of general interest.
I myself use a Mac OS X based PowerBook as my primary development
system, but I have to admit, I'm not the best GUI developer that has
ever walked on this planet. Far far far from it.
You're way ahead of me!
So I'd really love to do better. But frankly I'm at a loss here
and just don't know what sort of change to make.
Side note: Someone recently asked me how to move individual files
to the left side of the UI (to stage them). Apparently this person
had been using git-gui for months by just clicking "Add Existing"
(recently renamed to "Stage Changed"). It never occurred to the
user to try clicking the file's individual icons. Or to select
the files they were interested in and look for a menu option that
might work on that selection.
The one thing that struck me when I fired up git-gui was that it
wasn't
obvious to me which things I should try clicking on.
I had the same experience. I didn't recognize that the document
icon left to a filename is actually a button with an action
attached to it. I thought it would be there just to distinguish
a file from a directory.
I'd tend to use kind of a push button instead of an icon to
indicate the action of adding a file to the index (staging).
Maybe an arrow facing left? And an arrow facing right to
unstage?
For example: the buttons, drop-down menus, and check-boxes all cry out
to be played with. But the filenames in the lists at the top are less
obvious, and it might never have occurred to me on my own to right-
click
on the diff hunks at the bottom. That just looks like passive
colorized
text to me.
I don't know what sort of user-interface conventions say "play with
me!", though. Random ideas:
- maybe the cursor should change shape over the diff hunks (or
just the headers?)
- maybe buttons, hunk headers, file names, etc., should all be
in the same color?
- maybe the hunk headers could benefit from a little more
decoration? I don't know how to do that without just making
the display look more cluttered, though.
- maybe left-clicking on diff hunks should do something too?
In general it's always a good idea to make every action
accessible with only a single (left) mouse button. This
may seem ridiculous nowadays, but it really help to keep
things obvious. Right buttons and context menus have a
value for the experienced user to access things more
efficiently, but they should not be essential.
Steffen
[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/
Conceptual/OSXHIGuidelines/index.html
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