On Thursday 21 August 2003 08:03, Russell Francis wrote: > IMHO gtkg looks very cluttered with options found in various locations > and in no real consistent order. This is partly because of the large > number of options which the application has as well as it's style of > evolution, both of which I think are good things. It also presents the > user with tons of information on every page. Information > which should be available but maybe not all the time.... > > I think that a concerted effort to slim and redesign the UI would lead > to a program which is easier to interact with, is more intuitive and is > less of a cpu hog. What are others opinions on this?
I don't think a general interface overhaul is a good idea. It's too easy to design an interface which forces existing power users to start over from scratch, without being any easier for novices. Remember, nobody on this list--and almost nobody on gtk-gnutella-users--is a novice. (If you want to test your ideas on your mom/boyfriend/boss/insert-favorite-clueless-AOLer before submitting them, that would be very cool, but most open source projects don't do that.) I think a better solution is just to hide most of the information from users who don't need it (both to avoid confusion and distraction, and possibly to speed up the interface). Here are some concrete suggestions: 1. Make more things hideable. We have the Hide/Show Settings button on the Search page, and the View menu entries to Hide/Show the traffic bars, and a few things can be hidden on the config pages, but many more things need to be hideable. 2. Come up with one consistent way to handle the hide/show feature. I'd suggest disclosure areas.* 3. In a few cases, rather than completely hiding the extra information, replace it with summaries. For example, the traffic bars could be closed to show total in and out traffics, or opened to show separate http, gnet, and leaf traffic. 4. Provide a "novice mode" in addition to normal and expert. This would cose most of the disclosure areas, and maybe remove some entirely, remove a few pages entirely, and put some otherwise-always-open information into new disclosure areas. That should do it as far as simplification. But here are a few unrelated suggestions for helping newbies: 1. A couple of sample filters would help tremendously. For example: One called "real" that drops anything that's not a Real file; a second called "video" which passes off to "real" anything that's not an avi/mpg/etc. file; and a third called "movie" which drops anything <50MB and passes anything else off to "video." 2. Start on the search page, rather than the gnet page. 3. More documentation (and tooltips and so on) is always useful. (How does a newbie know whether she wants fuzzy searching or not?) 4. Provide a simple "Quickstart" explanation that will allow anyone who's ever used a p2p app to get the basics instantly, and give someone who's heard of p2p but never tried it out some hope of figuring it out. * I don't think "disclosure area" is standard Gtk/GNOME terminology. It's a frame within a window that starts off collapsed, but can be opened up to reveal a bunch of previously-hidden widgets by clicking a "disclosure triangle." Like the "details" section on most MacOS 7-9 dialog boxes. Anyway, I think it's easier to notice, better grouped, and less wasteful of screen real estate, than a separate Hide/Show button. However, that may be a matter of taste. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: VM Ware With VMware you can run multiple operating systems on a single machine. WITHOUT REBOOTING! Mix Linux / Windows / Novell virtual machines at the same time. Free trial click here:http://www.vmware.com/wl/offer/358/0 _______________________________________________ Gtk-gnutella-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gtk-gnutella-devel
