This is an interesting idea, and we did toy with similar thoughts early on in the design phase when we bumped up against exactly the same inconsistencies that you mention. In the end, we couldn't find "suitable evidence" that such a change would actually be beneficial, and so we kept with the "standard" metaphors.
For instance, with regard to a media player, the left and right time metaphor is often useful since it maps directly to the motion of the playhead within the graphical timeline which represents the length of the song. Of course, one might argue that you could turn that sideways as well, but then you have to completely rethink the positioning of the toolbars at the top vs. the side of the screen, etc, and you'd have a bizarrely inconsistent experience between multiple media activities and between activities and the browser as well. The undo/redo buttons don't have this problem. There is another potential point of confusion here too though. If you were to, for instance, turn the current icons on their side so that undo is an arrow which reverses direction and points down, while redo is the inverse, you'll notice that the shape of the redo icon looks like a 'U', which for me actually made me think "undo". Obviously this is language specific, but again, we weren't sure that its benefit would outweigh keeping with tradition. I'm certainly open to more arguments on both sides, if people have thoughts. As was mentioned, there is support for mirroring the interface as well (we don't do this perfectly yet, but we should be able to). - Eben On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 4:42 PM, Benjamin M. Schwartz <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 2008-02-21 at 15:21 -0600, Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote: > > The problem with left/right is that it is biased towards LTR languages > > (or it requires extra L10N work), and it inevitably inconsistent with > > the up/down axis necessary for lists. > > When running in an Arabic locale (or other RTL locale) the sense of the > entire UI is automatically reversed around the vertical axis. This > behavior is built into GTK, and Sugar has been made consistent with it. > Everything from the forward-back buttons in the browser to the list of > Activity launch icons is reversed. Try it. > > (This does not address your other suggestions.) > > --Ben > > _______________________________________________ > Devel mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel > _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
