On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Andreas Nilsson wrote:
What approach did you use to create this mockup?
I gave a shot at trying to mock up something with glade, but with disappointing results. However this definitely looks doable.
Bryce
Well, I used the Gimp...
Cool, it looks really good. I'm not sure if we'll be able to replicate it exactly, but I think we should strive to get as close as we can - this looks extremely good.
I am trying to learn Glade, but so far, all my attempts have been unsuccesfull.
Yeah same here, I thought it might provide a shortcut to having to implement the tree management stuff, but no such luck. It does not appear to generate code for managing tree widgets, and the stuff that it can do well is reasonably straightforward to do by hand.
Anyway, so I'd say, stick with gimp. ;-)
I do really hope that I have not created an uncodable monster here. :)
- Andreas Nilsson
Nah, it'll just be a considerable challenge. :-)
In fact, I had noticed earlier that we needed tree-oriented editing dialogs for several other purposes - the XML tree, layers, extensions, and possibly keyboard layouts. I was going to emulate the XML editor design, but what you've done for the preferences dialog looks like it provides the same basic capabilities, and I'm thinking that if we can implement this design, we can reuse it in at least 4 places.
One alteration I'm considering in order to support the other kinds of dialogs is a toolbar on the top of the dialog (see the XML editor). For the XML editor this is used for adding/moving/deleting nodes. How do you think we could use this in the preferences dialog? Perhaps the help button could be moved up there (saving some space on the bottom of the screen?) Perhaps an 'export preferences' function? 'restore defaults'?
The other thing I'm wondering is that some people are going to really like the extra space between widgets in the dialog (and it helps us adhere to the HIG, as you point out), however others will prefer more concise use of space in order to maximize the dialogs they can have open at once. Preferences are unlikely to be something people will want to have up all the time, and same with extensions, however with the XML editor and layers I'm not as sure - what do you think?
Bryce