Am Dienstag, den 26.06.2007, 18:09 +0100 schrieb Joel Holdsworth:
One thing I notice quite regularly is that because this a GTK app, it is inevitably primarily designed for Gnome. An example of this problem is the edit box I-beam cursor. In 0.45.1 when you hover over an edit box in windows you get a GTK style I-beam, rather than the windows system I-beam. I'm very glad that this has now been fixed in the developement builds. A second example is scrollbars. When you scroll to the maximum or minimum extent, the arrow buttons grey out. That behaviour makes sense, but it's not Windows standard, so it sticks out like a sore thumb.
If you have problems like this, please fix it in GTK and not in every GTK app. GTK+ is a multi-platform toolkit by the definition on there website and not only an Linux toolkit that works on windows too.
I guess I got a similar impression of the file dialogs. Far from making me feel like a first class citizen, it made me feel like it was one of those linuxy things that noone had got round to fixing sorting out yet - Linux being the primary platform for the project, and I being a mere "M$ Windoze" user. I definitely don't think we should add more options to resolve this - as they tend to be an excuse for dodging hard design decisions. I agree that it would be a shame to loose bookmarks and preview, but then I don't think many Windows users will know what they're missing. Instead they'll be happy that the application has the humility to "play the Windows game the Windows way".
I agree with you that we need other file dialogs on windows. An old usability rule is: "The Platform is the King." That means, it's not important to have the same dialogs on every platform, but to fit into the platform as good as possible. So the first question is, is there a standard Windows file open dialog? Look at Word, Photoshop, Coral Draw, Notepad and you will find 4 different file open dialogs. So we don't need "the standard windows file open dialog" because the users are used to different file dialogs. But we need a file dialog that fits better into windows. So I would suggest to write a gtk dialog, that looks like a windows dialog. The pros are, that all windows gtk apps will benefit from it and that we can still use the preview and the bookmarks.
I think it's quite important that we try and show Windows users that we take their platform sersously, because the majority of developers work on that platform, so we could do with attracting their input to get more inovation, and faster progress.
I can only agree with you, that Windows is an very important platform. But please don't hack the Windows support into Inkscape but make it the "right way". ;)
Regards, Tobias