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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: [KDE Usability] Misuse of toggle buttons, continued
From:       Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas <pedro.lopez.cabanillas () gmail ! com>
Date:       2010-08-18 6:59:18
Message-ID: 201008180859.19222.pedro.lopez.cabanillas () gmail ! com
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On Wednesday, August 18, 2010, Aurélien Gâteau wrote:
> I am finally back to this obsession of mine, toggle buttons. I wrote a
> wiki page for it and would like to get it in the HIG if we all agree.
> You can find it here:
>
> http://techbase.kde.org/User:Agateau/Toggle_Button

I'm not sure to fully understand your sentence "example: A music player should 
not use a toggle button to implement a Play/Pause button. It should use a 
normal button". In kmid [1] (MIDI/karaoke player) there is a normal "play" 
button and a "pause" toggle action. They are two different actions, 
and "pause" represents the paused state of the player. Wouldn't this usage be 
consistent with your proposal, except for the verb label?.

By the way, kmid uses a lot of toggles. For instance, the "channels" window 
alone has 48 instances of QToolButton with setCheckable(true). They change 
the icons when their states are changed, which is against your proposal. They 
are like check boxes and radio buttons, with a different icon for each state. 
The labels (column headers in this case) are also verbs (mute, solo, lock) 
instead of nouns. Would you propose "muted state", "soloed state", "locked 
state" instead?

> Technical note: I noticed while going through the code of KDE
> applications that unfortunately the KToggleAction class provided by
> kdelibs makes it quite easy to misuse toggle buttons. I thus started to
> write an alternative class which I will propose for inclusion in kdelibs
> to deprecate KToggleAction, assuming we agree on this addition to the HIG.

It is hard to comment without knowing your proposal in detail. Do you propose 
a class name change? new/removed methods?

Regards,
Pedro

[1] http://www.kde.org/images/screenshots/kmid.png
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