On Fri, 21 Oct 2005 16:30:38 +1300 jochen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> babbled:
> David Seikel wrote: > > When I made my E16 theme, I hacked the window menu for greater > > usability, and it looks like I will have to do the same when I port my > > theme to E17. In an effort to avoid menu hacking in a theme, I will go > > over those changes and their reasons now. > > > > First of all is the position of the Close and Kill items. With my E16 > > theme I found myself accidentally selecting Close, as the menu > > starts with Close already under the mouse pointer. Traditionally, the > > menu item that exits out of the application is at the bottom of the > > menu, for a good reason. For languages that scan from top to bottom, > > it makes sense that the last item you will ever select is the last item > > on the list. To avoid accidentally exiting out of something that may > > require some non trivial amount of work to setup again (things like, > > you are half way through a big HTML form in your browser) it makes > > sense to not make application exiting too easy. > > > Although I'm not a developer and atm things are made the way the > developers like it I have to speak up now. I strongly disagree with > this. I close almost all my apps with alt-right-click ->close, and I > think that the close item is probably the menu item which is used most > often. How many times are you going to change the remember settings or > make a window sticky? I think the ordering of the menu should reflect but there is a point of "put the options of least harm closest to an accidental activation". its a good idea imho - very good. u have to shuffle the mouse a little more, but its still there. i havent added any dialog for kill - thouhg for KILL its likely a good idea as that will KILL stuff off nastily. it is an item of last resort > how often you use a certain menu item. I think this kind of handholding > goes strongly against the philosophy of keeping things simple and > letting the user make the descisions. If I type rm -rf / I don't want to > be asked are you sure, are you really sure... _REALLY_ are you sure! > This is very annoying and it just makes things a lot less usable. > Additionally when you close an application window, almost all apps will > tell you that there are changes which haven't been saved and if you > really want to quit. So the danger of loosing several hours of work is true - also e does sport features to protect yourself from your own stupidity - window locks -> "protect this window from being accidentally closed becauset it is important" :) e will disallow the user to close the window - and inf act e will refuse to EXIT until that window has gone away. the idea is that if you have some insanely important thing going on in that window, you can protect it from your own stupid mistakes. u have to go remove this lock to allow yourself to close it. :) > not even there yet, and if you really worked for several hours and did > not save in between you deserve to loose your data. What is next? Alter > the close button so you have to press it for several seconds, so you > might not accidentally press it. Or everytime you stop or reboot your > computer have a window pop up: "You are trying to shutdown your > computer, you should do a backup before you do, are you sure you want to > shutdown?" Sorry if I sound really harsh I don't mean this personal in the menu is different as it pops up and peopel do accidentally hit the first itme with a twitch of their mous and then go "what the fuck happened" as they didnt SEE the close option - it all happened too fast. i have seen this a LOT - people with bad mouse/motor skills who clikc ANd move the mouse at the same time then click again because they cant keep the butotn pressed and waver between press/release. simply moving the harmful options further away alleviates this. power users still have the option there. u can use keystrokes (up arrow then return to activate the last item - in fact numbers 1-9 and then 0 hilight the first 10 menu items), ctrl+alt+x, - the close butotn still is there, etc. > any way but I feel very strongly about this because I think this > alterations for making apps more "userfriendly" are in 90% of the cases > making apps harder to use for experienced users. IF these options were lower down in the menu from the start i doubt we ever would have head about this being bad for experienced users. basically i know why you are complaingin - you have learnt/built certain unconscious "motor operations" with your figners - and now u'll have to adjust or re-learn them. and you dont want to. being a wm that is in cvs and not release - we do reserve the right to entirely change things around and such learnt habits will have to adapt :) personalyl i think re-ordering is for the better overall. -- ------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" -------------- The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 裸好多 Tokyo, Japan (東京 日本) ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
