Petr Kovar posted on Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:01:27 +0100 as excerpted: >> The best improvement I could suggest for the tabribbon would be adding >> icons, as it looks a bit plain and the many tabs undistinctive and hard >> to pick out at a glance, as it is. An option for icons-only, no text, >> would be nice, but I'm not sure how it fits in with the gnome/gtk >> guidelines. But icons and text would at least break up the long string >> of instinctive tab labels a bit. > > Even the tab ribbon with text labels and icons next to them doesn't fit > in with the GNOME HIG guidelines that Pan has been trying to follow. > > FWIW, for the GNOME 3 / GTK+ 3 apps, the menu item icons were removed > and are no longer used by default. So in order for Pan to fit nicely in > a GNOME / GTK+ environment, I'd suggest not to use the icons even though > I can understand the concern with picking up the right Pref dialog tab. > :-)
Frankly, I regard the no menu icons policy as about as insane as the whole gnome3 the way we designed it and we don't want extensions because they'll ruin the purity thing. Fortunately (IMO) that got toned down a bit and extensions are now looking to become almost as much a vital part of gnome3 as they are of firefox. (FWIW, that's what finally got me off of konqueror by default, extensions such as noscript eventually became too vital to do without, and while konqueror has extensions, the community simply isn't big enough to form the critical mass necessary to support a viable extensions community, and even if the devs tried to keep up with noscript in konqueror itself, they couldn't, because they simply can't give it the dedicated attention that the guy doing the firefox extension can. Plus that's only one extension out of many I might use, albeit one of the most vital ones. Chromium's up and coming, but isn't going to have the extension community maturity and depth of field of firefox since it's so new, and besides, the open chromium project isn't going to be the extension community's main focus anyway, the closed chrome project is.) People's eyes are simply more adapted to picking out image distinctions than text distinctions (even when the images are small enough the details get lost), and while the descriptive text is nice for newbies, with a bit of familiarity, picking out and using at least the commonly used functions should be faster with the images, without even reading the text beside them any more. But... that's beside the real point I'd make, which is that regardless of what the default is (text-only wouldn't be my default choice but then, I've never yet seen a desktop environment that I was comfortable with out of the box and I don't expect I ever will), as long as there's an option to change it, I'm fine. Which of course goes against the whole gnome hig and purity guidelines, since they generally discourage too many options and try to force users into the "one true way" to a large extent, the primary reason I'm in the "anything but gnome as long as it's free as in freedom" camp (IOW, I'd take gnome if it were the only freedomware alternative, over non-free, but it's not), but there you have it. (And FWIW, unlike some I'm GLAD there's a freedomware desktop alternative with that sort of philosophy, since that tends to attract the devs with a similar philosophy and keep them from overrunning the "if there's a case to be made for a choice, choose a good default but expose that choice to the user so they can change it if desired" camp. Similarly, I'd imagine they're glad there's a place for the rampant customizers to go, keeping them out of gnome's hair.) So presumably if there's a choice for only-icons, there'd be a choice for only-text as well, along with the middle choice of both. I actually thought about mentioning that explicitly in the OP, but decided against it as by the time I thought about it, it would have required reworking a paragraph or two, to fit, and I thought it was likely obvious. The point being I don't really care what the default is, text-only to align with the gnome hig is fine, but would find it useful to at least have an option for icons, as well, and once that's there, then there might as well be all three choices. The other alternative would be doing something else to try to make the tabs distinct or at least to have fewer of them, as you suggested combining them. If there were fewer of them, the need for icons or whatever to make them distinct would go down accordingly. There's just too many with too little distinction to easily handle at this point, and combining some of them would combat that as effectively as adding icons would. > Of course, this is not to say that Pan shouldn't care about non-GNOME > environments. What's been interesting for me to watch over the years is the struggle between customization options that people kept asking for and (originally) Charles' desire to keep things streamlined in accordance with the gnome hig and his own feelings. I saw at least two cycles of "throw almost everything out, only bring back what people ask for" under Charles, including the rewrite to C++. Since the renewed development after the stagnation period when he left, pan lost the rigid discipline he had in that area, and has sprouted all sorts of new options. Not that I'm at all unhappy with that, but it has been a contrast to the way he ran things and to (what I understand of) the gnome HIG. Tho pan always did seem to press the boundaries a bit in that regard, probably part of the reason I found it so useful and likely one of the reasons knode really never developed into a big competitor, either -- pan was flexible enough to work for kde and other users as well as gnome users. But now it seems we've reached the other extreme, too many options or perhaps more correctly, too unorganized, as they've developed faster than the organization of them has. Combining options tabs and reorganizing preferences would seem to have developed into a rather urgent priority, ATM. Longer term, I expect it'll all come back into balance, pressing the gnome hig envelope somewhat, likely more than before, but rather more organized than it is now, and more usable once again. It's a process, tho, not a destination, and it's certainly my pleasure to be part of that process, contributing where I can in the pan community I'm a part of. =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman _______________________________________________ Pan-devel mailing list Pan-devel@nongnu.org https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-devel
