On Tue, 2004-07-27 at 05:11, Emanuele Aina wrote:
MenTaLguY ricercò:
Scroll-and-click by itself is neither a simple nor an efficient approach for them.
Yes, but the solution is select-as-you-type (as in nautilus), not the text entry.
Hmm, I think you're right as far as that goes. Typeahead find would remove most (though not all) of my need for the text entry.
The decision to hide the text entry (it is still here, just press Ctrl-L as in a web browser) was taken to hide the complexities and the differences of the underlying OS from the user.
From a UI perspective, that is a failure. How is the user supposed to know Ctrl+L does this?
The UI will fail not when you can use a program for the first time, but when you cannot use it after someone has told you how to use it.
I don't agree. While it isn't practical to make everything _obvious_, if the UI is not "discoverable" without folk knowledge or examining the source code it is an abject failure.
Well, I've read about during the development process. But I've already used it in mozilla and epiphany before. And also in nautilus, when I've upgraded to GNOME 2.6
Bear in mind that Inkscape's core audience are exclusively neither Gnome nor even Unix users.
There needs to be a visual "affordance". For example, Mac OS X's open dialog also hides part of its UI from the naive user, but it provides an expander widget -- a standard visual metaphor both indicating that there is more hidden UI, and providing a _visible_ means of revealing it.
This could be a good idea, but with the expander my use didn't change: I press Ctrl-L to get the text entry, which is now in the expanded part of the dialog, instead of a popup window.
That seems acceptable to me. Keyboard shortcuts as "folk knowledge" are at least tolerable, provided there are other visible means of performing the same tasks.
-mental