From kde-usability Sun Jun 30 17:48:14 2002 From: Troels Tolstrup Date: Sun, 30 Jun 2002 17:48:14 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: KFileDialog toolbar X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=102545929412173 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Sunday 30 June 2002 04:54, Irwin K wrote: > I've assembled pictures of existing "Open File" dialog boxes from > various locations. > > The page puts all of the pictures inline, so please excuse the > transfer times... I did the page as a quick hack. > > http://yetta.net/~arcana/kde/openfile > > As you can see, KDE doesn't necessarily have the most complex dialogs > (or the simplest). Make sure you look at the Windows dialogs: they > embody most of the features that we are discussing the placement of > and can give us some ideas of how they placed a lot of items into > very few buttons. Of the shown dialogs i dont really like the gimp or the mozilla ones. They look and feel too much like something from the 80s. Of course the look is not all that important, and i also have other problems with those two, but i think discussing them is irrelevant here. Of all the dialogs, including the kde one, i prefer the open office one. It is simple, it is nicely layed out, and except for sorting, i can easily guess how to do things. Which lead me to the next thing, is sorting a power user feature? Now that i think about it i havent actually ever seen anyone try to sort the list in a file dialog. I have often seen people sort a file manager window, but not a file dialog. If this is true, and not just a case of bad memory or strange friends, then i think it makes sense to put the sort option in the RMB context menu. The only options i think should be added to the open office dialog really would be a show hidden files checkbox and the bookmark menu, and possibly a forward button. The microsoft one is not too bad either. I dont know if i like the way the tool menu is written with text while the rest is icons, but else this dialog is pretty close to being an open office dialog with a preview area (or to be fair, open offices dialog is close to being a ms office dialog without a prewiew area) I think corel draws is interesting in that they added a menu bar in addition to the tool bar. I think the dialog looks good, but it is on the heavy side with toolbar buttons, but in case the options are matched in the menus then i dont think it matters too much. The one thing i like about the added menu bar is that people who generally use the menu bars instead of toolbars would feel more home in it. I do think a lot of things could be removed from it. And then we have kdes. It looks pretty much like microsofts and open office's, yet not as elegant or simple. One small thing is that i think it looks a bit messy that the location field isnt aligned with the file selection box. I think this was done because whoever made it judged that the toolbar buttons were more important than the location bar, which i dont really agree with as i think the contents of the location bar is quite important. But at least im happy that it is small things (IMHO) that really differentiate the different dialogs. Only corels is really much different. I think most of us agree that the current dialog needs some work, though it doesnt seem like we agree much as to how it should be done (at least aaron and i seems to be seeing things differently, which is probably a good thing :) I would personally like to see something as clean and simple as the open office one, while still preserving the options not displayed on the buttons. Mvh Troels -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE9H1/VmTmAA3i3lrERAhkOAKCV9Ao/BgT6RR64GYdKb7JXRMmJ9QCgi2+k JE/KbO3SJNXfoj9YKE2cWtc= =GB2/ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability