Previous discussion:
blah, blah, blah ...
>> I was talking with James Cape (of the GNOME UI improvement project) about
>> the dia toolbox (the current situation with a notebook containing heaps
>> of sheets is becomming a problem, UI wise). His suggestion was to have a
>> seperate window for each sheet. Does anyone have any comments on this?
>> If we do change over to something like this, then we will probably add
>> code to save which sheets were open, and where they were placed, so you
>> don't have to place all the sheets every time you start dia.
>We definitely need to do something about the mass of sheets. I don't think
>forcing them out into seperate windows would be good -- then there'd be a
>lot of window flipping. On the other hand, the ability to take a sheet out
>into a seperate window is good. I could see it being some kind of
>selection widget (menu, list, whatever) where you select which sheets to
>load. The selection obviously must be remembered, as well as whether
>they're in the toolbox or in a seperate window. By default I'd put them in
>the toolbox with a tear-off strip or somesuch.
My 2 centavos (and I'm not doing any coding on this project, so ignore if
you like; I'm just a humble user who likes using this program):
IMHO:
Multiple sheets are needed, but only one sheet should be displayed at a time
within the current frame. Remove the tabs as they tend to give the
appearance of clutter (and some are hard to understand). Use a drop-down
selector up top where the tabs currently reside to pick the single sheet you
want displayed. This approach would take up less screen real estate than
popups and accomplishes the same task using much of the framework already
developed. You could probably even get by with resizing the current frame
up a bit to accomodate a bigger displayed sheet (just don't go overboard).
Include a global properties button on each sheet to set properties for all
objects on the sheet at once.
William F. Helke
"Now, if I could just get my employer to abandon M$ and get a real
operating system!"
