Hello, I've made some (potential) changes to the GTK2 interface (patch attached). If y'all agree they are good I will make the same changes to GTK1 as well. The aim of the changes is to simplify the interface a bit and make things a little easier and more attractive for novice users.
You may think I'm totally out to lunch so please have a peek at this. Here are some screenshots in case you don't feel like compiling the patch. http://dist.struggle.ca/gtkg/simplegui.html Changes: - Moved the new search entry to the sidepane - Reorganized navigation treeview. (Search and downloads are the first two entries) - Added "simplified gui" checkbox (on by default) in the gui config tab which hides extraneous settings and indicators. It does not affect the other "hide/show settings" menus. Things I'm hoping to add in the next little while: - Right clickability in the search results summary on the sidepane (to close selected search, clear results, close all searches, etc.) - Download summaries for downloads from multiple hosts (a la limewire), similar in appearance to the way gtkg already shows similar search results from multiple hosts Justifications for changes (in case they're needed ;-): The current gtk-gnutella, although crammed full of features, tweakability, and indicators, is confusing and daunting for novice users. The average person just wants to search for stuff and then download it, and have some reasonable idea of what's going on, they don't care about their TTL or what their incoming leaf node bandwidth is but they want to know how many people they are downloading a particular file from. The basic search interface is a bit confusing for people as we have so much stuff (filters, file info, settings, passive searches, indicators, etc. etc.) to show that we have to mix user interface metaphors to some extent (ie. tabbed interfaces, dialogs, treeviews..). I don't think we can do this perfectly without losing some of our functionality (which I don't want) but the more we can simplify it the better. - I feel having everything that the user needs to deal with managing searches as a whole (creating new searches, hits summaries, navigating between searches, etc.) on the left sidepane in one place and having everything about a specific search in the big search tab on the right (results, close search, clear results, filters) makes it a little clearer what's going on. Also we have the advantage that old limewire, KaZaA, etc. users are used to a search interface that looks like this. (Filters have to do with "individual" searches and with "searches as a whole" and where the filters button is now seems awkward but I don't know where to stuff it) - Many users will only ever use the "Search" and "Downloads" tabs, maybe sometimes taking a peek at the "Uploads" tab. Seems to make more sense to order them in this way. "(Search" should probably be renamed "Search Results" but I seem to remember problems with two words names...) - When I was testing this out on my roommate (who has the uncanny ability to be confused by the simplest interfaces and break the most robust programs) the only real problem was that they started downloading a couple files, went to the downloads page, and got scared of all the "chunk" messages and couldn't figure out what was being downloaded from where. After I explained that different pieces of the files were being downloaded from different people at the same time she gave me a sceptical look and said "ok, but it doesn't look like that. How can I figure out what's going on?". I have to admit that a huge number of quickly scrolling and changing messages would be scary if I didn't know what was happening. Anyway, so I figured it'd be good to neatly summarize downloads from multiple hosts something like limewire does. (They have a single progress bar that says the number of hosts the user is downloading from). I think we could use a similar display as we have for the search results, ie. a tree that we can expand if you want to see the gory details. This is something I'd like to try to add in the next week or so if y'all agree. - The rest of the changes are pretty self-expanatory, I just hid things that were confusing and unlikely to be used by a novice user. Emile -- Computer Troubleshooting, New Computer Advice, Virus Clean-up, Hardware/Software Installs, Web Design, Linux Installations: Attune Consulting can help. http://www.attuneconsulting.com [EMAIL PROTECTED]
simplified_gtk2_gui.diff.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
