Default UI preferences for 3.7

stéphane ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu Jun 17 09:39:38 UTC 2004


Could we have drag and drop per default in the browser?

Stef

On 17 juin 04, at 01:41, Doug Way wrote:

>
> We had some threads awhile ago about various default UI preference 
> settings which were never really resolved... see forwarded message.  
> As I'm preparing the 3.7gamma image, I thought we should probably do 
> something about this before 3.7 comes out.
>
> For example, should the menu icons be turned on by default?  Should we 
> pick a narrower font for the window title font?  Etc.  It's difficult 
> to come to a consensus on these sorts of things, and then we tend to 
> not do anything about it and just go with the status quo.  Personally, 
> I think most of the current defaults are just fine, but I wouldn't 
> mind changing a couple of things.
>
> My thought was to have a vote on the SqueakPeople site, similar to 
> previous votes we've had, except that we'd vote on all of the UI 
> default decisions at once.  (Only the ones that actually need a vote, 
> of course.)  So, for example, these might be the voting items:
>
> 1. Should menuWithIcons be turned on by default? (currently true)
> 2. Should gradientMenu preference be turned on by default? (currently 
> true)
> 3. Should scrollbarsNarrow preference be turned on by default? 
> (currently true)
> 4. Should the scrollbar width be tied to the size of the default text 
> font as it currently is?
> 5. Should gradientScrollbars/alternativeWindowBoxesLook preferences be 
> turned on by default? (currently true)
> 6. Change window title font default to Accujen12? (considerably 
> narrower than the current BitstreamVeraSans11, but we lose 
> antialiasing)
>
> And then you'd vote on the SqueakPeople thread with a range between -1 
> (for strong opposition) and +1 (for strong support), as we've done 
> with previous votes.  (And you could add optional *brief* comments 
> after your vote if you wanted.)  Like this:
>
> 1. -1 (the menus just look a bit too cluttered with these on IMHO)
> 2. 0 (don't care)
> 3. 0
> 4. -1 (tying scrollbar size to one particular font and not others is 
> too arbitrary)
> 5. +1 (gradients look good!)
> 6. +0.5
>
> We could add a few more items to the voting list, but we don't want it 
> to get too big.  Actually, I think most of the ones which came up on 
> squeak-dev are covered in my list above, but if someone feels strongly 
> about a particular preference, bring it up now and I could add it to 
> the list.
>
> These voting items should all be things which can be set easily with a 
> preference, or a trivial code tweak.  Let's not get into more abstract 
> things like "Should we switch to a Skins look?" which would require 
> major code changes... we want to settle this stuff for 3.7 which is 
> about to go gamma.
>
> It's also true that it's hard to come up with a coherent "look" if 
> we're voting on a bunch of interrelated look-related things 
> one-by-one.  But I think my examples above are mostly 
> non-interrelated.  (And that's why I grouped 
> gradientScrollbars/alternativeWindowBoxesLook together as #5... it 
> wouldn't make much sense to have one turned on and the other turned 
> off by default.)
>
> Thoughts?
>
> If no one comes up with a radically better idea to decide these 
> things, I will add the poll to SqueakPeople sometime tomorrow.  If a 
> vote is near 50/50, it could be up to Diego & myself to be 
> tie-breakers. ;-)
>
> - Doug
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Aaron J Reichow <reic0024 at d.umn.edu>
>> Date: March 7, 2004 12:33:16 AM EST
>> To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list 
>> <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>> Subject: Re: New look doesn't necessary means better look
>> Reply-To: The general-purpose Squeak developers list 
>> <squeak-dev at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
>>
>> Yoshiki-
>>
>>>   The world menu in Squeak3.7a-5764 looks, ..., too great to me.  The
>>> uneven linespacing, caused by the icons, is very unusual thing to see
>>> and hard to use indeed because the same amount of mouse movement
>>> results in different offsets of the menu items.
>>
>>
>> I agree. It's a bit too much for me. I am all for sprucing up Squeak 
>> so it
>> is more accessible to outsiders, but some of this ...
>>
>>> # I can live with the gradient menu.
>>
>>
>> I kind of like this myself. Gives a nice texture.
>>
>>>   Narrower scroll bars aren't very easy to use...
>>
>>
>> I agree. Unless on a PDA, which usually have lower DPI screens, 
>> making the
>> narrow bar actually physically wider. But on a 320x240 PDA is the only
>> place that I use narrow scrollbars in Squeak, otherwise they're 
>> harder to
>> use. And I'm the kind of person who likes smaller widgets- but on an 
>> OS
>> like Windows, scrollbars are on of the things I don't make smaller.
>>
>>>   The good thing is that those have the preferences to control.  So
>>> the question is what preferences we would like to turn on/off in the
>>> vanilla 3.7 release image.  I'd like to say that to turn off the
>>> #menuWithIcons and #scrollBarsNarrow.  How do people think?
>>
>>
>> I agree. That'd be great!
>>
>> Regards,
>> Aaron
>
>
>
>




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