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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Response to Celeste's KDE4 Guideline Request
From:       "Aron Stansvik" <elvstone () gmail ! com>
Date:       2006-12-15 16:06:29
Message-ID: 751a4f870612150806m205958bfke652f7574813db52 () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hello all.

I grepped my #koffice IRC logs for some recent discussions where UI
guidelines has been brought up and posted an answer comment to
Celeste's latest blog post [1]. Casper suggested that maybe a more
formal response would be good. My response to her blog is copied
below. Anyone want to add/change anything before e-mailing it off to
Celeste?

- Configuration dialogs

More thorough specification of the preferred behavior and look of the
configuration dialog.

- Ellipsis in menu items

There was a recent discussion in #koffice about when a menu item
should have an ellipsis (…) appended and when it should not. The KDE
guidelines are pretty sparse on this, only a couple of lines. It would
be nice if the KDE guidelines would clarify if there are any cases
where a window is shown as a result of pressing the item, where
ellipsis should _not_ be shown, what's currently said is that "A
simple confirmation dialog is not considered a dialog that requires
additional information.". The Microsoft guidelines for this are much
more verbose [1].

- Widgets side by side with the status bar

A "view bar" is in the process of being added to KOffice (or at least
to some of its applications such as Krita). This consists of a few
buttons and a numeric input for the zoom level, and it's placed side
by side with the status bar (technically inside it actually). What do
the guidelines have to say about placing widgets in this area? It can
be seen in applications like Inkscape and Photoshop.

- Interactivity of numerical zoom input

If the user interface directly offers a numerical input for the zoom
level. When should the zoom be updated? When the user presses Return
or Tab in the input widget? Continously as the number is typed in?
After a certain number of milliseconds of keyboard inactivity in the
widget? For the "view bar" described above it was (for now) decided
that Enter or Tab is required for the zoom to be updated, but would be
great to have usability folks' input on this.

That's it.

I'm pretty sure I'm overly verbose here, and maybe some of the four
issues here were already resolved on IRC and need not be taken up in
the guidelines. So please trim away as you see fit ;)

Regards,
Aron

[1] http://weblog.obso1337.org/2006/kde4-guideline-requests/
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