Happy New Year everybody, I would like to ask your opinion on this new GTK feature: more beeps here and where. There are lot of places where it beeps now, and probably many of them are good, and I want to ask about two specific places:
First, it beeps when you press a shortcut for insensitive menu item. For instance, if Undo is disabled and you press Ctrl-Z, it beeps. In particular, you can press and hold Ctrl-Z to undo all changes and wait until it starts beeping (it beeps on every key press, i.e. you hold keys and it's beeping repeatedly). Second, it beeps when you press an arrow key or Home/End or PageUp/PageDown (or those with modifiers) in a text widget (GtkTextView or GtkEntry) and cursor can't be moved, i.e. if it's already where this key would move it - first position for Left, first position nit the paragraph for Home and so on. For instance, if cursor is at the beginning of an entry and you press Left, it beeps. And if you press and hold Left in an entry to move to start, it starts beeping repeatedly when cursor reaches start position. Is this right from usability point of view? It's said that this beeping actually is usability - you get notified when an action initiated with keyboard failed. But I believe it's counter-usability, computer should not beep if nothing that requires user attention happened and nothing happened that user won't know about without beep (e.g. if you press Ctrl-V and paste failed for some strange reason but not because there is nothing in clipboard). There is an issue of people with vision troubles, they may really benefit from additional beeps. I can't talk about that, since I really have no idea how the toolkit should behave in that case, though I do believe it should be different from the default mode. It might be my special personal reaction, but when I hear beep on pressing Up key, I think "Huh? What happened?! Did I get email in Mozilla or did my hard drive failed?" What do you think? Thanks, Yevgen _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
