On Tue, 2007-04-17 at 16:23 +0100, Thomas Wood wrote: > Either that, or including the remaining options in the theme. For those > on the "Options" tab it might make sense as some themes might want to > specify if icons are shown in buttons for example. However, it obviously > doesn't make much sense to add font hinting settings to the theme. How > could we separate these in an obvious way though?
Well, one argument might be that font rendering preferences really belong in a separate, OSX-like Displays capplet, where one defines screen resolution, multi-head layout (I wish!) and colour profiles (I wish!). After all, if your desktop spans both a CRT and LCD display (as my laptop's often does), you'd ideally want a different rendering setting on each display anyway :) > > I don't think it's too hard to argue that metacity's "no maximise on > > dialogs" theory is somewhat flawed. Any window that benefits from > > resizing should be maximisable IMHO, although some windows may require > > constraints other than "the full size of the screen". E.g. in this > > particular case, you probably just want to maximise the window > > vertically (something for which we even have a keyboard shortcut, > > ironically), but not change the width at all. OSX has the upper hand on > > us here with its zoom button, I guess. > I'm not sure. After all, what's the difference between a Dialog window > and a Normal window? Presumably Dialog windows are asking for some kind > of user input or action, hence their name. Any other window should be a > Normal window. I don't see that Preference windows are really creating > any sort of dialogue with the user. Well, I don't really think the distinction is important to the maximisation question-- if the window is made more useful by being resizable in one or both dimensions, we're failing by not allowing the user to do it. We have other visual cues available to us to make the distinction between different types of window, although the fewer types the better anyway as far as I'm concerned. (Most users regard them all as 'just windows' anyway, although a taxonomy is certainly useful to us as designers.) > I'm not quite sure about this, as Metacity allows you to use key > combinations to close the current window anyway. Perhaps someone can > comment on whether this is still relevant. Well, IIRC, the sort of concerns raised at the time were: - Without the Close button, a blind user has to infer that the dialog is instant apply by the absence of any action buttons. The presence of the Close button gives them a more positive indication. - For people with limited mobility in their hands, a key combination isn't necessarily as easy to input as hitting Tab a few times, then Space. (Sticky keys can help out here of course, but the user may or may not be using that.) I can get in touch with the accessibility folks again and see what they think, though. Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer Sun Microsystems Ireland mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] GNOME Desktop Group http://ie.sun.com +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
