Kirk Bridger wrote:
Thomas Wood wrote:
Could anyone give me some advice on bug 149323 (HIG issues with Theme
Preferences). The issue is that the theme manager often takes longer
than one second to apply a theme, so therefore it should not be
instant apply. Would it be acceptable to most people to change the
theme manager to explicit apply?
-Thomas
[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149323
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Is the 1 second thing a technological limitation? I guess on less
powerful systems this just might not realistic.
Perhaps it would be best to have instant apply with user feedback?
WindowsXP does that fade to gray fade back thing. That process can be
scaled to last long enough to match the computer's speed. But I wonder
if that would be a good idea with instant apply. Then an accidental
click could be very frustrating. There might be a better way to provide
user feedback asking them to wait than the fade effect, or a busy
cursor, but I can't think of any right now.
The problem is, all the theme manager does is set a few gconf keys. It
has no way of knowing when the settings have been applied, or even if
they succeeded. I doubt that there is much we can do to speed up the
process either.
The theme previews aren't really big enough to decide if you like it or
not, so clicking through them is needed to make the decision - to 'try'
them out would be best. I think if the user is provided with an
"Applying Theme" type of feedback, implicit would still be best.
One of the other bugs I am looking to fix deals specifically with the
fact that the previews aren't good enough. However, the theme manager's
current interaction model wouldn't cope with a larger/more detailed
preview image. The only way around this would be to have a preview area
with a separate drop down list of themes. This would mean that explicit
apply would have to be used anyway.
There are a number of bugs open with suggestions on how to improve the
UI. I also want to implement a colour schemeing interface now that we
will have the ability in GTK+ 2.10. However, I can't see any easy way to
do this without using explicit apply. Does anyone have any suggestions?
-Thomas
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