From kde-devel  Thu May 13 16:36:20 1999
From: Torsten Rahn <rahn () astrophysik ! uni-kiel ! de>
Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 16:36:20 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: Applets? [ was: Re: kde mp3 player]
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=92662816331925

On Thu, 13 May 1999, Sirtaj Singh Kang wrote:
> On Thu, 13 May 1999, Torsten Rahn wrote:
> [snip]
> > This would be very stupid. The other solution is much better: especially 
> > if you use features very often that are *generally* used less often (and
> > therefore have no icon)!
> 
> Well, it would be a shame to lose a feature like this because there are
> not enough icons to go around. In the worst case, the less commonly used
> actions just won't have an associated custom icon, and the user will have
> to provide one (and if it is good enough, could go into the library of
> custom icons) or use the default icons. A lot of these icons will be
> duplicated across applications anyway, which is a good thing.
 
O.k. I agree that:

- it should be possible to drag and drop all menu-entries that have an 
  icon (which appears in the menu, too) to any toolbar (and it should
  be possible to create custom toolbars, too)
- but for the rest it should be possible to rip off a menu. If you 
  use a feature not very often most of the time and suddenly you need 
  it very often (which happens especially with drawing-tools) for 
  some time then it's very annoying to: 

1.first create/ choose a new icon (takes much longer than to just click
  on the dashed (or however it would looklike) menu entry that ripps 
  the menu off.

2.get used to the new icon. I use Corel Draw very often (CorelDraw! not
  CorelPhotopaint! Gimp is much better in most cases ...). And I'm still
  irritated when I search a seldom-used-feature between the toolbars.
  "How did the icon look like -- hmm, all these icons are non-intuitive crap!"

I have used both solutions (*1.only* in MS Office and *2.only* in Geoworks)
and both alone have their advantages and disadvantages ...
  
And just to make it clear: I will *not* help to draw any large
toolbar-icon-set with 'maybe-the-user-will-need-this-or-that-icon'.
This would be a waste of poor resources (there are still
just a few artists around!) and a never-ending project. We could do 
something such more effective in the same time ...

Torsten


  

 -Taj.
> 
> Sirtaj S. Kang            taj@kde.org                ssk@physics.unimelb.edu.au
> Univ of Melbourne      
>                        "I'm a commercial operating system."
>                                -Doug Michels (CEO SCO)