[Usability] New menubars Idea -- still considered or not?

[Antonio]

I want to ask if the new menubars idea I proposed is still of interest
or it is rejected if so why?

Here's a link to mockup:
http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/4500/newmenusystem.png



Anton

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Re: [Usability] New menubars Idea -- still considered or not?

[slawek]

It would be great to convert menu into toolbar. Just drag&drop it.

Dnia 2009-07-21, wto o godzinie 10:55 +0300, Antonio pisze:
> I want to ask if the new menubars idea I proposed is still of interest
> or it is rejected if so why?
> 
> Here's a link to mockup:
> http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/4500/newmenusystem.png
> 
> 
> 
> Anton
> 
> ___
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Re: [Usability] Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Tim Evans]

Henrique Carvalho Alves wrote:
There was discussion on this some time ago, and the discussion got lost. 
I'm trying to raise interest

on this issue again.

I did a mockup for a new gtk+ font chooser, as I find the current one 
lacking from usability aspects,
and wanted to gather some feedback. If there's any interest, please read 
the rationale at my blog:


http://hcalves.tumblr.com/post/144502395/one-thing-i-dislike-on-gtk-its-the-current-font

The mockup is functional and implemented in Python + Glade. It's 
available at my Launchpad:


https://code.launchpad.net/~hcarvalhoalves/+junk/gtkfontdialog

I would appreciate feedback from user and developer viewpoints, and 
further discussion for

improving the dialog.


A few things I noticed, which may be specific to win32:

The "Typeface" list for many windows families (Verdana for example) is 
"Oblique", "Normal", "Bold Oblique", "Bold".  When switching to those 
families Oblique is always selected.  If it's going to revert to 
anything when selecting a new family it should be Normal.  Ideally it 
should try and stay with the previous typeface selection, even switching 
between Oblique and Italic depending on what's available.


The family list is by far the largest, at least on my machine, yet has 
the least vertical space.  Is there any way that this list could be bigger?


The common fonts list may be wrong at least for Vista.  A good common 
set might be:

 - Calibri, already there and is the Vista default sans-serif font.
 - Cambria replaces Times New Roman as the default serif font.
 - Consolas replaces Courier as the default monospaced font.
 - Segoe UI is the new default UI font, replacing Tahoma and Verdana.
Personal opinion, but I think these new Vista fonts are a lot better 
than the older ones and users should be encouraged to use them.  I guess 
the older fonts could be kept in the list for backward compatibility, 
ideally at the bottom of the list.


--
Tim Evans
Applied Research Associates NZ
http://www.aranz.com/
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Re: [Usability] Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Diego Moya]

I'd like to see fonts classified by type category:
- Serif vs sans,
- old-style, modern, script and display typefaces in serif,
- grotesque, realist, humanist  and geometric in sans-serif,
- high vs low readability
- professional vs amateur

This would greatly help people like me who don't know a lot about the
features available in the various typefaces, but know which effect are
looking for.
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Re: [Usability] Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Mackenzie Morgan]

On Tuesday 21 July 2009 7:52:11 am Diego Moya wrote:
> I'd like to see fonts classified by type category:
> - Serif vs sans,
> - old-style, modern, script and display typefaces in serif,
> - grotesque, realist, humanist  and geometric in sans-serif,

Er...I thought Gentium was considered a humanist font? That's definitely a 
serif font.

-- 
Mackenzie Morgan
http://ubuntulinuxtipstricks.blogspot.com
apt-get moo


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Re: [Usability] Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Diego Moya]

2009/7/21 Mackenzie Morgan :
> Er...I thought Gentium was considered a humanist font? That's definitely a
> serif font.

:-P
What part of "people like me who don't know a lot about typefaces"
didn't you get?  ;-)

I got all my knowledge about sans-serif classes at the Wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sans-serif#Classification

My point was not to create a perfect taxonomy of typefaces in the
dialog, but some kind of "if you select this, you can choose from a
number of similar typefaces " option. This is a goal-oriented
interface for people who can't tell apart one typeface from another,
much less by name.
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Re: [Usability] Gtk+ Font Dialog improvements

[Calum Benson]

On 19 Jul 2009, at 05:55, Henrique Carvalho Alves wrote:


I did a mockup for a new gtk+ font chooser, as I find the current one
lacking from usability aspects, and wanted to gather some feedback.  
If there's any interest,

please read the rationale at my blog:

http://hcalves.tumblr.com/post/144502395/one-thing-i-dislike-on-gtk-its-the-current-font



It looks like a nice clean design, at first glance -- I haven't tried  
the code, so can't comment on the interaction details.


In addition to the other comments people have raised, might I throw in  
a couple of ideas from other font selectors that I've found useful  
over the years:


* The ability to create my own groups of fonts.

* The provision of a dynamic group that consists of (N) recently-used  
fonts.


* The ability to use a slider or spinbuttons to increase/decrease font  
size.  Alberto mentioned this too, but the specific use case I have in  
mind is when you have a selection of text in a document that includes  
a mixture of font sizes (and potentially different fonts, but that  
doesn't matter in this case), and you want to use the font dialog to  
change the properties of that selection.  With a slider, you can  
easily increase/decrease all the different font sizes in the selection  
by the same amount, which can be very useful indeed.


Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer   Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.ben...@sun.comOpenSolaris Desktop Team
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Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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Re: [Usability] New menubars Idea -- still considered or not?

[Calum Benson]

On 21 Jul 2009, at 08:55, Antonio wrote:


I want to ask if the new menubars idea I proposed is still of interest
or it is rejected if so why?


Well, nobody here really has the power to accept or reject any ideas,  
we can just comment on them and help people improve them as best we  
can :)


Personally, I do still find it quite hard to envisage exactly how your  
ideas will work, just from static screenshots and text descriptions.   
So it might help if you could put together some kind of storyboard,  
animation or interactive mockup (e.g. in DHTML), or find somebody who  
can do that for you, to help us a bit more.


For something that fundamentally changes such a long-established part  
of the desktop, I also suspect it would take a lot of cycles of  
usability testing and refinement to get it right -- consider the  
amount of usability resources, thought and effort that was put into  
the ribbons feature of Microsoft Office 2007 and subsequent MS apps,  
for example, which targets a similar sort of area to your proposal...




Cheeri,
Calum.

--
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer   Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.ben...@sun.comOpenSolaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems

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