On 10 Apr 2006, at 12:43, Glynn Foster wrote: > > On Fri, 2006-04-07 at 16:21 +0100, Calum Benson wrote: >> >> Not yet, still working on that bit... although we didn't bother >> changing >> the menubar applet in previous JDS versions, so it was always out of >> sync, but nobody ever complained AFAIK. So that's probably not a >> high >> priority. > > Didn't bother = Didn't realize it until too late, and then it was a > suitably low priority = Screwup, and I'll happily own up to that one.
Heh... nonetheless, it's interesting that nobody (to my knowledge) ever cared enough to file a bug, until I got around to it :) >> It's true we seem to be getting pulled a bit in two directions these >> days though... not so long ago it was the "minimize the number of >> patches we maintain" edict, but more recently it's all "we can do >> better >> for our users than the generic community version" again. What's a >> man >> to do...? > > Just as long as those offering advice really understand the costs of > such changes. I don't think I can really properly understand them > myself, but I imagine it's running into 10's of thousands of dollars > when you add it all up. Very possibly, although of course you have to offset that against any savings in support costs etc. that the changes bring too. It's always difficult to cost-justify UI changes, although I do have a book on the subject that I really ought to read sometime :) >>> o The [username] submenu is really going to look out of place. >> >> Well, it's basically just the community Places menu of course, so we >> could just go back to calling it Places again. I wouldn't have any >> objection to that personally. > > It just looks a bit bad if you have a crufty username. There's a > lot of > people not particularly proud to be a number, myself included - not > sure > we want to expose it too much. Well, the original rationale was to gradually introduce users to the idea that there's a directory with their name on it containing their Documents plus all their other stuff (i.e. their home directory), so that if and when they saw it in Nautilus, they would equate it with the place where all their stuff was. I do think it's going to be hard to do that in a meaningful way though, and I think it would only take the merest whiff of "difficult to implement" to convince me to replace it with the community Places menu... although given my blog rant today about the state of Places in GNOME, that's not necessarily a good thing either :/ (http:// blogs.gnome.org/view/calum/2006/04/10/0) >>> o I don't think we should include at-poke in the menus >> >> Hmm, why not, how is it any different from other development tools? >> (Which admittedly aren't in there yet-- I'm still waiting on the list >> that we want to include.) > > Is it really useful to the developers we're trying to capture? It's > not > the most intuitive of interfaces either :) True, although show me a developer tool that has one of those :) You do have a point, at-poke would be more useful if it also worked with Java apps, and I don't think it does (not sure off-hand though), so I'm inclined to remove it too. The a11y team wanted it on the menus last time though, so that's possibly a discussion for them and marketing to sort out between them. >>> o Save Screenshot/Take Screenshot - is the string change *really* >>> that crucial? >> >> No, but it matches the title of the dialog that appears when you >> select >> it, which is needlessly different at the moment. Would want to >> try and >> get this change back to the community, certainly (as we would with >> almost all of the proposed tooltip changes, probably-- most of the >> current community ones are dire). > > I'd be happy with an upstream change - let's get it changed there > before > we change our menus, IMHO. Fine by me. > Yeah, that's rather unfortunate as well. However, you seem to admit > that > there's a lot of merit in the current community layouts - perhaps we > need to start from there, and see what absolutely *has* to change. > I'm not sure 'familiarity with JDS 3' is altogether that important > - do > people really remember menu contents and locations? Would a new layout > really surprise them a whole deal? You'd probably be surprised just how much they remember, if they use the menus regularly. On the other hand, we're going to be changing some things this time whatever happens, so equally it might be better to absorb as many changes in one go as we can. But... I've just been told again that the UI spec is to be considered frozen as of today except for agreed changes based on Nevada users' feedback (or, I guess, from other Sun usability folks), so I'm afraid we'll probably have to postpone that exercise for now. (Of course, this also means that I'd encourage /all/ of you in OpenSolaris land to tell us what you think about the UI changes when they land, because if you don't, we're much less likely to fix the bits you don't like...) Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:calum.benson at sun.com Java Desktop System Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
