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List:       kopete-devel
Subject:    Re: [kopete-devel] Re: kdenetwork/kopete/protocols/oscar/icq/ui
From:       Stefan Gehn <sgehn () gmx ! net>
Date:       2004-07-11 20:52:49
Message-ID: 200407112252.49766.sgehn () gmx ! net
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On Sonntag Juli 11 2004 22:31, Casey Allen Shobe wrote:
> On Sunday 11 July 2004 12:58, Stefan Gehn wrote:
> > Stop breaking the dialogs, make them huge like shit and making
> > inappropriate comments about stuff you neither coded nor have a clue
> > about!
>
> I may not have coded the view/edit user info dialogs, but I know how they
> work, and that they are currently extracted from the same .ui file.  While
> this makes maintaining a single UI easier, it makes layout very difficult
> because of the duplicate widgets in the cases where one or the other widget
> is removed based on context.
>
> The widget types needed for viewing and editing are totally different.  In

no, they are not.

> some cases, you have the dual thing in the .ui, and pick one based on
> context as a workaround.

that's no workaround, that's cutting down codesize.

> Keyboard accelerators are needed for the qlabels in editing, but NOT in
> viewing.  There's currently no consideration for that, and adding them in
> the C++ will be incompatible with i18n.  You could strip accels for all the
> qlabels in view mode though.

having them in view mode doesn't hurt either, duplicating the amount of work 
to keep both dialogs in a similar look weigths way more for me.

> So, a whole lot of things can be overridden in the C++ (difficult to
> maintain), or there can be two .ui files instead (easy to maintain, and
> more flexible).

two times the work if you redo something.

> > Hell, this userinfo dialog is taking half of my monitor now
>
> I'll revert that if you haven't already, it's not much different and came
> out poorly.  I thought it looked a little better, so I went ahead and
> committed it (not intended as a final version at all).
So why do you commit this stuff right away anyway? Don't you think discussing 
changes with the developers would be a good idea?
This is _exactly_ what I was trying to explain to you some hours ago on IRC. 
Nobody seems to think about discussing stuff before editing other people's 
work. This is _not_ the way teamwork works. If you are working on something 
somebody else created you cannot just change it and hope the other person 
also agrees with your thoughts.

> > and the alignment in the account ui is broken as well.
>
> Explain how please?  The alignment looks fine there for me...

I was referring to the horrible text hint about registering an account. that 
vertically centered link just looks plain ugly.

> > Furthermore italics + bold
>
> Italics were there before to indicate directions, bold is to indicate that

The italics was already wrong, it was some weird idea from somebody else.

> that part is the name of another object.  It's clear, consistant, and
> userfriendly.

But bold _and_ italics at the same time?? Did you ever get told about 
typesetting? You _never_ever_ mix these styles, it's a big "no go".

> > and unneded checkboxes (override default server...).
>
> This checkbox enables/disables the server & port options.  99.9% of users
> will _never_ use these fields, so making them enabled (more visible) makes
> the UI look more confusing and intimidating.  This way, it's clear that
> they don't need to worry about them unless they want to override the
> defaults,

That's why the server settings are on a tab of their own. They don't need to 
be touched in general as long as you are not using a corporate icq-server 
(yes, something like that exists/existed).

> and the dialogs look better. 

A checkbox doesn't make a dialog look better

> > There's only one thing to sum it up: WTF
>
> I have talked to a lot of users, and they like the dialogs better.  If they
> didn't, I wouldn't bother wasting my time making them.

Ahh yes, the famous users "unknown" and "nowwhoisthat"? Really, that sentence 
does not tell me anything (no, this is not mean to be a joke). There are a 
lot of users out there having _horrible_ ideas of how a gui should look like. 
Just look at the fonts and colors some people use on their desktops, I saw 
tons of screens with horrible setups that made window captions unreadable and 
whatnot. I don't really trust every user I stumble accross and that's a good 
thing.

> > Please stop thinking you are the only one who can do these dialogs right,
> > this clearly shows YOU ARE NOT THE ONE!
>
> I don't think that.  But please don't think the same about yourself,
> because the users tend to think differently.  And there's no need to be so
> rude, at all.  I'm investing a lot of my time in this, and wouldn't be if I
> wasn't trying to do the best job possible. 

Please read the UI styleguides of at least KDE and GNOME

See:
http://developer.kde.org/documentation/library/ui.html
and
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/

> If you have suggestions, I'm 
> open to hearing them, but if you're going to be nasty like this, please
> don't bother clicking your send button.

Yes, communicate more before "wasting" your time (i.e. creating something and 
seeing it go to the dustbin because it was wrong is quite discouraging so try 
to avoid that) and read more docs about UI design.

Bye, Stefan aka mETz
-- 
ICQ#51123152 | Moege der Pinguin mit euch sein
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